Climate Change Is Breaking Earth’s Beat

Abstract

Forests, deserts, rivers, and oceans are filled with animal vocalizations and geological sounds. We postulate that climate change is changing the Earth's natural acoustic fabric. In particular, we identify shifts in acoustic structure that all sound-sensitive organisms, marine and terrestrial, may experience. Only upstream solutions might mitigate these acoustic changes. 1 Text From pole to pole, numerous animal species transmit sounds for communication, foraging, and navigation, in particular. Sound is a major element of animal behavior that is used, for example, in territory defense, mate attraction, parent-offspring identification, orientation, prey localization, predator escape. Natural sounds may also come, in part, from plants, initiated both internally and as a consequence of external abiotic forces such as rain, wind, and moving water. Here, we emphasize that climate change is transforming two components of the global soundscapes (Figure 1): biophony which includes biotic sounds; and geophony that groups abiotic, but natural, sounds coming, for example, from running water, wind, and earth movements. Weather properties play a role in the propagation of animal sound in the surrounding environment as sound speed depends on a range of parameters including ambient temperature, relative humidity, wind, and rain intensity. Variations in these parameters can drastically change the range of communication between individuals [1] unusual weather conditions might prevent sound propagation, for example, the temperature might be too high or the air too dry. In addition, there are abundant examples that demonstrate how temperature directly governs the acoustic behavior of terrestrial, aquatic, and marine animals through chemical and physiological regulation, in particular

Climatic breadth of calling behaviour in two widespread Neotropical frogs: Insights from humidity extremes

“…As shown here and in previous studies (Krause & Farina, 2016;Llusia, Márquez, Beltrán, Benítez, et al, 2013;Sueur et al, 2019), automated acoustic monitoring techniques (Sugai et al, 2019)…”

“…As shown here and in previous studies (Krause & Farina, 2016; Llusia, Márquez, Beltrán, Benítez, et al, 2013; Sueur et al., 2019), automated acoustic monitoring techniques (Sugai et al., 2019) can provide important information on species behaviour under different climatic conditions, thus assisting climate change research. With these new techniques, the thermal breadth of calling activity can also be further investigated and provide a complementary view on the response capacity of anuran amphibians to climate change.…”

Year-round passive acoustic data reveal spatio-temporal patterns in marine mammal community composition in the Weddell Sea, Antarctica

“…anthropogenic noise), can provide further (year-round) contextual information on the ecological and acoustic quality of underwater marine habitats. In light of on going environmental changes, the potential of passive acoustic surveys and acoustic indices in the context of biodiversity and habitat quality monitoring is still heavily underexploited (Sueur et al 2019). Particularly for the marine realm, these methods represent a source of untapped and hidden potential to become vital players for efficient large-scale environmental monitoring of the Earth's natural soundscapes.…”

Acoustic indexes for marine biodiversity trends and ecosystem health

“…Some studies have reported significant differences among biological sounds of different habitats, which reveal a spatial heterogeneity and could serve as indicators of habitat type [25,28,29]. Other authors have postulated that climate change is shifting the sounds of our environments [30], and sounds have been proposed as a proxy to measure the effects of changes on biological populations and assemblages. A reduction in frequency and intensity of sounds produced by the world's noisiest marine invertebrate (the snapping shrimp, Alpheus sp.)…”