A procedure for the calculation of the noise impacts from a spatially stochastic source

Abstract

There is growing concern over the impact of human intrusion into the habitat of certain wild animal species. A major part of this intrusion is in the form of noise from moving vehicles. The level on the ground or underwater caused by moving noise sources has been dealt with as single-event intrusions that may cause startle and associated physiological responses, and as cumulative noise exposures. The later approach allows correlation between the cumulative noise exposure of the whole animal population, and the change in population numbers and overall health. Currently, the most difficult part of this analysis lies in determining the sound exposure of the population since both the animals and the noise sources are spatially and temporally varying. There is a certain amount of knowledge about the movement of both the noise sources and the population; this knowledge can be used to create a kinematic simulation of the motions of both entities. Such a simulation has been used to yield long-term spatial probability distributions of noise sources that can then be superimposed over similarly obtained distributions of the population. This superimposition yields the required estimates of the total noise exposure of the population.