The remote environmental assessment laboratory's acoustic library: An archive for studying soundscape ecology

Comparisons Between Autonomous Acoustic Recordings and Avian Point Counts in Open Woodland Savanna

“…However, research in soundscape ecology is currently booming (Table 1), and this increase is a testament to technical improvements in acoustic recorders and soundscape analysis tools that have been developed over the past 10 yr (Servick 2014). Programmable recorders now allow for simultaneous, long-term, multisite recording (Acevedo andVillanueva-Rivera 2006, Brandes 2008), and data management systems like Pumilio (Villanueva-Rivera and Pijanowski 2012), the Remote Environmental Assessment Laboratory (REAL) digital library (Kasten et al 2012), ARBIMON (Aide et al 2013), and Ecosounds Acoustic Workbench (Truskinger et al 2014) have facilitated data organization. In addition, necessary research on soundscape dataset visualization has recently advanced (Towsey et al 2014b).…”

“…For example, Gage and Axel (2014) published a record of the temporal variation of biophony over a 4 yr period at 30 min recording intervals, thus providing the ability to analyze daily and yearly soundscape patterns. Other longterm recording programs have been conducted by the REAL (Kasten et al 2012; recordings available at http:// dev4.real.msu.edu). Similarly, Pijanowski et al (2011b) initiated an ongoing, long-term monitoring project in 2008 to describe the soundscape phenology of various Indiana habitats (the collected recordings are available in a database at http://soundscape01.rcac.purdue.edu/pumilio).…”

“…Soundscape ecology would bring complementary knowledge about landscape contexts (Tucker et al 2014, Fuller et al 2015. Extensive, currently accessible soundscape libraries from which such data could be derived include those of the Center for Global Soundscapes (http://centerforglobalsoundscapes.org) and the REAL (Kasten et al 2012 Kasten et al (2012), may also have to be applied or developed in order for ornithologists to consider representative samples from any given dataset. Collaboration with technicians and engineers will be necessary in this regard.…”

“…In our example, it responds to the 2 peaks of biophony due to vocal activity of geese and songbirds. (B) Normalized Difference Soundscape Index (NDSI; Kasten et al 2012) values were calculated with the function ''ndsi'' in ''soundecology'' (frequency threshold ¼ 2 kHz). A LOWESS curve (bold) was fitted to the points using the function ''lowess'' in the package ''stats'' (f ¼ 0.2).…”

Listening to ecosystems: data‐rich acoustic monitoring through landscape‐scale sensor networks

“…Many new software tools for processing and analyzing large acoustic datasets have been developed, including methods for the abstraction of animal signals into soundscape indices (Kasten et al 2012), and more recently, methods for automated identification of bioacoustic signals (Digby et al 2013). However, few studies to date have used these tools to examine patterns of biodiversity over a long duration and/or broad geographic scale (Lomolino et al 2015).…”