Elsevier

Ecological Indicators

Volume 58, November 2015, Pages 207-215
Ecological Indicators

Connecting soundscape to landscape: Which acoustic index best describes landscape configuration?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2015.05.057Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We examined the soundscape–landscape relationship in eastern Australian forests.

  • We compared six published acoustic indices.

  • Three acoustic indices were related to landscape configuration, condition and biodiversity.

  • Soundscape assessment is a useful remote ecological monitoring tool.

Abstract

Soundscape assessment has been proposed as a remote ecological monitoring tool for measuring biodiversity, but few studies have examined how soundscape patterns vary with landscape configuration and condition. The goal of our study was to examine a suite of published acoustic indices to determine whether they provide comparable results relative to varying levels of landscape fragmentation and ecological condition in nineteen forest sites in eastern Australia. Our comparison of six acoustic indices according to time of day revealed that two indices, the acoustic complexity and the bioacoustic index, presented a similar pattern that was linked to avian song intensity, but was not related to landscape and biodiversity attributes. The diversity indices, acoustic entropy and acoustic diversity, and the normalized difference soundscape index revealed high nighttime sound, as well as a dawn and dusk chorus. These indices appear to be sensitive to nocturnal biodiversity which is abundant at night in warm, subtropical environments. We argue that there is need to better understand temporal partitioning of the soundscape by specific taxonomic groups, and this should involve integrated research on amphibians, insects and birds during a 24 h cycle. The three indices that best connected the soundscape with landscape characteristics, ecological condition and bird species richness were acoustic entropy, acoustic evenness and the normalized difference soundscape index. This study has demonstrated that remote soundscape assessment can be implemented as an ecological monitoring tool in fragmented Australian forest landscapes. However, further investigation should be dedicated to refining and/or combining existing acoustic indices and also to determine if these indices are appropriate in other landscapes and for other survey purposes.

Introduction

Soundscape ecology is the study of sounds in the landscape (‘soundscape’) and is based on how sounds from biological, geophysical and anthropogenic sources can be used to understand natural and human systems at multiple temporal and spatial scales (Pijanowski et al., 2011a). Biophony, geophony and anthrophony are terms used to characterize sounds that occur in the landscape (Pijanowski et al., 2011a). Biophony refers to the sounds produced by living organisms, usually sounds that are used by animals as a means of communication. This may include birds, amphibians, insects, mammals, fish, amphipods, and crustaceans in both terrestrial and aquatic systems. Geophony is the collection of sounds caused by physical processes such as wind, water flow, thunder, rainfall, and earth movement. The sound created when humans use mechanical devices is referred to as anthrophony (or technophony). This includes the sounds that come from stationary machines such as fans and air conditioners, and mobile machines used for transportation and construction such as aircraft, cars, trucks, boats, building cranes, bulldozers etc.

There has been considerable interest and research to develop and compute acoustic indices that represent the characteristics of the soundscape. Early research in this field led to the application of landscape metrics (reviewed in Turner, 1989) to the soundscape using acoustic diversity indices (Gage et al., 2001, Napoletano, 2004). These indices were based on the quantification of spectrogram images, calculated by dividing the spectrum into frequency bins and using automated processing of multiple spectrograms (Gage and Napoletano, 2004). A computation approach using the power density spectrum (Welch, 1967) was then developed and used to characterize temporal changes in the soundscape in Sequoia National Park (Krause et al., 2011). The computation of acoustic metrics from multiple recordings was further developed to compute soundscape power (Matlab code can be obtained from the authors). Subsequently, the normalized difference soundscape index (Joo, 2009, Kasten et al., 2012) was created to estimate the relative amount of biophony and anthrophony in the soundscape by computing the ratio of anthrophony to biophony found in field-collected acoustic recordings.

Farina et al. (2005) examined landscape ecology from a cognitive perspective and described new thinking about how organisms perceive landscapes according to signals and signs in the context of energy flows within the landscape. The acoustic complexity index was developed based on the observation that many biotic sounds, such as bird songs, are characterized by an intrinsic variability of intensities, while human-generated noise is often constant in intensity (Pieretti et al., 2011). Pieretti et al. (2011) found that this index correlates with the number of bird vocalizations, while efficiently filtering airplane noise. The acoustic complexity index has been used to describe avian soundscapes (Farina et al., 2011), relate avian soundscapes to vegetation complexity (Farina and Pieretti, 2014) and describe the influence of traffic noise (Pieretti and Farina, 2013). It is calculated as the average absolute fractional change in spectral amplitude, averaged over all frequency bins for the entire recording. Similarly, Boelman et al. (2007) developed a bioacoustic index which was a function of both the spectral amplitude and the number of frequency bands in a sound recording. This index was shown to be strongly correlated with avian abundance in Hawaiin forests experiencing weed invasion.

Acoustic diversity indices have also been developed to facilitate automated surveying of ecosystems for rapid biodiversity appraisal (Sueur et al., 2008b, Sueur et al., 2012). The acoustic entropy index is one such index and is computed as the product of both the temporal (acoustic energy dispersal within a recording) and spectral entropies (acoustic energy dispersal through the spectrum) following application of the Shannon index (Sueur et al., 2008b). Simulations revealed a correlation between the acoustic entropy index and species diversity and in field studies this index was found to be sensitive to disturbance in Tanzanian forests (Sueur et al., 2008b). The acoustic diversity index (Villanueva-Rivera et al., 2011) is a modification of spectral entropy and is also calculated using the Shannon index, while the acoustic evenness index uses the Gini coefficient as a measure of evenness (Villanueva-Rivera et al., 2011).

The theoretical underpinning of the application of acoustic indices is that communities with more audible species have a greater acoustic diversity and that biodiversity will correlate positively with acoustic diversity (Gage et al., 2001, Qi et al., 2008). Despite the existence of a suite of acoustic indices, few comparative studies have been undertaken. Towsey et al. (2014) provided a thorough investigation of multiple indices relative to a comprehensive avifauna census dataset. However, the focus of their study was to develop a computer assisted sampling methodology to obtain a more efficient estimate of species richness than random sampling alone, rather than to evaluate acoustic indices relative to landscape condition or configuration.

While it has been proposed that there is an intrinsic relationship between the soundscape and the landscape (Pijanowski et al., 2011b), there have been few studies that have tested this explicitly (see Bormpoudakis et al., 2013, Tucker et al., 2014). Furthermore, recent studies in urban environments have highlighted the importance of land use planning regarding the evaluation of the soundscape using a landscape perspective (Kuehne et al., 2013, Votsi et al., 2012). However, while a range of studies have recorded and analyzed acoustic signals produced by birds, insects and other audible organisms to assess the effects of disturbance on biodiversity (Blumstein et al., 2011, Depraetere et al., 2012, Laiolo, 2010, Proppe et al., 2013, Sueur et al., 2008b), a lack of standardized methods to evaluate landscape characteristics has probably inhibited research on linking soundscape with landscape configuration. Recently, an ecological condition framework that assesses landscape characteristics has been developed to meet biodiversity offset policy demands (Eyre et al., 2011). Tucker et al. (2014) conducted an evaluation of fragmented spotted gum forests in eastern Queensland, Australia using this framework and found that there was a significant relationship between the soundscape and the size and connectedness of forest patches, but other landscape features such as road fragmentation and land use were not studied. Consequently, our study aims to investigate the patterns of six acoustic indices and relate these patterns to an array of landscape features and ecological condition in nineteen fragmented forest sites in south-eastern Australia.

Section snippets

Study sites

The study area was situated in South-east Queensland, Australia; a region characterized by a subtropical climate, fast growing population and increasing urban and peri-urban pressures including reduced native forest cover and habitat fragmentation. Nineteen sites were selected in forest patches ranging in size from 3 ha to 44,110 ha (see Supplementary Material 1 for site location details). Ten sites were located in patches of remnant spotted gum (Corymbia citriodora ssp. variegata) open forest

Time-of-day acoustic indices

The pattern of each acoustic index is plotted over hour of day during the soundscape recording period averaged over the ten spotted gum sites (Fig. 1A) and nine scribbly gum sites (Fig. 1B). The overall patterns for the same acoustic index are similar across the two forest types. The ACI and the BIO have similar patterns; they rise rapidly at the dawn chorus, decline until the evening chorus, increase slightly then decline until the dawn chorus is reached in the morning (about 0600 h). H and ADI

Discussion

Automated soundscape recording and analysis technologies have the potential to serve as a powerful conservation planning tool for measuring the influence of disturbance, fragmentation and declining ecological condition on biodiversity. While studies have shown that anthropogenic sound has a negative impact on biodiversity (e.g. Bayne et al., 2008, Proppe et al., 2013, Reed and Merenlender, 2008) and that the integration of soundscape and landscape studies can result in improved landscape

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge Tom Tarrant for expert analysis of bird calls, Teresa Eyre and Annie Kelly from the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection for assistance with biocondition and access to spatial data, and Peter Young for botanical advice and assistance on locating benchmark sites. We thank Jerome Sueur for advice on using seewave-R and Luis Villanueva-Rivera for incorporating the Normalized Difference Sound Index into the soundecology package. We would

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