Bioacoustic Devices Could Help Save Rainforests

'Researchers writing in Science argue that networked audio recording devices mounted in trees could be used to monitor wildlife populations and better evaluate whether conservation projects are working or not,' writes Slashdot reader Damien1972. From the report: Compared to ground surveys and camera traps, the technology provides cheap continuous, real-time biodiversity monitoring at the landscape scale. Thousands of hours of recordings can now be collected with long-lasting batteries and stored digitally. In sites with solar power and cellular signal, multi-year recordings have now been transmitted and saved to scientists' databases. That's possible thanks to the steep drop in the price of equipment that enables researchers to collect more than short, isolated sound snapshots.

The key, says co-authors Eddie Game of The Nature Conservancy and Zuzana Burivalova at Princeton University, is to build out enough data to understand how changing soundscapes reflect biodiversity on the ground. Game says he has found plenty of 'high-conservation value' tropical forests that are devoid of key species. This is common in reserves set aside by owners of plantation crops such as palm oil. Algorithms can use these recording to learn the sound of healthy forests, and infer the composition of their species. In Papua New Guinea, for example, the researchers found soundscapes in fragmented forests were far quieter during the dawn and evening choruses, the short cacophonous periods during the changing of day and night. Once enough data has been collected the technology can be applied to the zero deforestation commitments set by corporations.

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