Author links open overlay panel – Ruth E. Happel Robin J. Happel

Soundscapes represent the sum of biotic, abiotic, and human generated sound in the landscape. Monitoring sounds can lead to insights both on habitat integrity and an early warning of threats to them. Where soundscapes are endangered, technology has made soundscape recording and analysis more accessible and affordable, resulting in the ability to continuously monitor wide areas for habitat health and human activity. Coupled with global communications and computing platforms, soundscape monitoring and analysis permits low cost and continuous monitoring of natural habitats. This is important because as climate change and human activity disrupt more and more habitats it provides a rigorous but cost-effective way to quantify and monitor changes to minimize habitat loss and extinctions.

Ruth E. Happel, Robin J. Happel, in Encyclopedia of the World’s Biomes, 2020

The field of soundscape ecology combines elements of bioacoustics, the study of animal vocalizations, with environmental acoustics, the scientific study of how sound is carried through the landscape (Krause, 2017). Every place in the world has a unique audio signature. This is composed of a combination of several types of sounds. Biophony includes biological sounds, the voices of animals. Geophony refers to geophysical or abiotic noise. For many places, for much of the year, the only natural sounds may be geophysical, including wind, storms, and water such as rivers or oceans. Anthrophony are the sounds made by people, including both the voices of people along with everything manmade, which now can be heard in even the most remote corners of the world with the sound of engines and planes. Increasingly it is hard to escape man-made noise anywhere in the world.

Soundscape ecology can be seen as a specialized branch of landscape ecology. As with the study of habitats, soundscapes can be classified based on geography, looking at the way ecology shapes them according to both physical factors and the influence of people (Pijanowski et al., 2011). As discussed elsewhere in this encyclopedia, anthromes are biomes shaped by how people interact with ecosystems, and need to be considered to fully understand biogeography (Martin et al., 2014).

Just as disturbance shapes biomes, it also influences the integrity of natural voices. As a pragmatic science, it seeks both to understand how human disturbance interferes with the functioning of soundscapes, and how measuring this can help both predict, measure and remedy these disruptions.

Anyone who has enjoyed a dawn chorus of birds in the spring time, or a night chorus of insects, can appreciate that animal sounds can be a striking part of a soundscape. While they may be viewed as a relaxing accompaniment to a natural setting or even just background noise, to the animals they serve a very serious purpose justifying the energy expenditure to make loud and repetitive sounds.

Like any other part of a habitat, the ability of a sound to carry far enough to be effective is a resource that can be as important as food or shelter for an animal. If a species cannot deter intruders or find mates in a habitat it will eventually become locally extinct. For this reason, animals have evolved strategies that differ from each other to make sure their specific vocalization can both get through and be understood by the intended recipient. As is often the case in nature, this simple need leads to marvelously complex and rich soundscapes where different species vocalize in different frequencies, at different times, and with different harmonics and rhythms

In the most ecologically diverse habitats, animals should be seen to occupy most spaces of the audio niche both temporally and spatially. In other words, there should always be an animal calling, at each frequency. In a sonically saturated habitat such as a tropical rainforest at dawn, all the sound niches may be so fully occupied that animal species may take turns, for example a bird of one species calling briefly and another calling at the same frequency when the first bird stops.

Animal vocalizations are a critical part of their survival and reproductive strategies. As a result, animals have evolved to develop distinctive vocalizations that carry as far as possible. The ability to transmit sounds to reach the maximum number of potential mates or deter the most rivals conveys clear selective advantages. Using sound takes less energy than physically patrolling a territory so is a good adaptive strategy.

This paper discusses how animals divide the sound niche into acoustic habitats, and how these sonic patterns can be used to study and predict the health of animals and their biomes. Techniques are described to use soundscapes as a tool to protect species and their habitats.

• I think sound is a really interesting medium to work with for many reasons:
• it is disruptive and destructive force that humans have a limited way to sense and understand so we often turn to sensors to help explode the amount of sound we can monitor
• sound has many different forms of sensing – depending on what you are and what mechanisms you have to process that information – what mechanisms are there to detect sound beyond vibrating (human centric)
• sound and audible information is effective and emotive to humans. one of the more emotive senses? (something to fact check….)