Using ecoacoustics metrices to track grassland bird richness across landscape gradients

Shamon, Hila; Paraskevopoulou, Zoe; Kitzes, Justin; Card, Emily; Deichmann, Jessica L.; Boyce, Andy J.; McShea, William J.

doi:10.1016/j.ecolind.2020.106928

Cited by 30 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…We measured the Bioacoustic Index for each recorder. The Bioacoustic Index defined by [45] is calculated by measuring amplitude and frequency within 2-8 kHz frequency range and has been positively correlated with both avian richness and abundance [45,46]. The index measures the area under the amplitude-frequency curve and excludes the range of anthropogenic sounds (0-2 kHz).…”

Section: Bioacoustic Indexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Bioacoustics to Examine Vocal Phenology of Neotropical Migratory Birds on a Wild and Scenic River in Arizona

Bateman

Riddle

Cubley

2021

Birds

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Passive acoustic recorders have been used successfully as automated survey tools to detect terrestrial wildlife. However, few studies have monitored Neotropical migratory bird use of riparian forest habitat using this technology. Within dryland ecosystems, the forests along rivers support high bird diversity. Many bird species of conservation concern require these floodplain forest habitats for foraging, migration stop-overs, and breeding. Few studies have explored the use of acoustic records in riverine systems designated for conservation for their natural resource value via the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act in the USA. Using acoustic recorders, we document vocal activity of four riparian-obligate species (Bell’s Vireo, Vireo bellii; Summer Tanager, Piranga rubra; Yellow Warbler, Setophaga petechial; and Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus) to determine species occurrence along a Wild and Scenic River. We established three study reaches along the perennial Lower Verde River, in the Sonoran Desert of central Arizona, USA. Nine acoustic recorders were used over the period of 80–120 days during the summer of 2018. We measured vegetation composition and structure in 100 m2 plots paired with acoustic recorders. Visualizing vocal activity showed that three species were calling and singing at each reach; whereas, one species, the cuckoo, had fewer recordings and occurred later in the summer. We demonstrate the utility of acoustic monitoring even when applied to rare birds in complex riparian habitats. This information is important for land management and conservation efforts concerning these species of interest and identifying important habitat features in Southwestern US riparian woodlands.

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Section: Bioacoustic Indexmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Bioacoustics to Examine Vocal Phenology of Neotropical Migratory Birds on a Wild and Scenic River in Arizona

Bateman

Riddle

Cubley

2021

Birds

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“…Typical soundscapes recorded from this landscape are dominated by grassland birds, especially Western Meadowlark, Vesper Sparrow ( Pooecetes gramineus ), and Grasshopper Sparrow ( Ammodramus savannarum ) (Shamon, 2021 ). The two common sources of geophony are wind, which creates low‐frequency energy in recordings, and rain, which creates wide‐band pops when it strikes the recording device.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated detection of frog calls and choruses by pulse repetition rate

Lapp

Richards‐Zawacki

et al. 2021

Conservation Biology

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Anurans (frogs and toads) are among the most globally threatened taxonomic groups. Successful conservation of anurans will rely on improved data on the status and changes in local populations, particularly for rare and threatened species. Automated sensors, such as acoustic recorders, have the potential to provide such data by massively increasing the spatial and temporal scale of population sampling efforts. Analyzing such data sets will require robust and efficient tools that can automatically identify the presence of a species in audio recordings. Like bats and birds, many anuran species produce distinct vocalizations that can be captured by autonomous acoustic recorders and represent excellent candidates for automated recognition. However, in contrast to birds and bats, effective automated acoustic recognition tools for anurans are not yet widely available. An effective automated callrecognition method for anurans must be robust to the challenges of real-world field data and should not require extensive labeled data sets. We devised a vocalization identification tool that classifies anuran vocalizations in audio recordings based on their periodic structure: the repeat interval-based bioacoustic identification tool (RIB-BIT). We applied RIBBIT to field recordings to study the boreal chorus frog (Pseudacris maculata) of temperate North American grasslands and the critically endangered variable harlequin frog (Atelopus varius) of tropical Central American rainforests. The tool accurately identified boreal chorus frogs, even when they vocalized in heavily overlapping choruses and identified variable harlequin frog vocalizations at a field site where it had been very rarely encountered in visual surveys. Using a few simple parameters, RIBBIT can detect any vocalization with a periodic structure, including those of many anurans, insects, birds, and mammals. We provide open-source implementations of RIBBIT in Python and R to support its use for other taxa and communities.

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“…This project was supported by Jiangsu Province Forestry Science and Technology Innovation and Promotion Project (grant number LYKJ-XuZhou [2021]1).…”

Section: Data Availability Statementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biotic sound SNR influence analysis on acoustic indices

Chen

Xu²,

Zhao³

2023

Front. Remote Sens.

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In recent years, passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has become increasingly popular. Many acoustic indices (AIs) have been proposed for rapid biodiversity assessment (RBA), however, most acoustic indices have been reported to be susceptible to abiotic sounds such as wind or rain noise when biotic sound is masked, which greatly limits the application of these acoustic indices. In this work, in order to take an insight into the influence mechanism of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on acoustic indices, four most commonly used acoustic indices, i.e., the bioacoustic index (BIO), the acoustic diversity index (ADI), the acoustic evenness index (AEI), and the acoustic complexity index (ACI), were investigated using controlled computational experiments with field recordings collected in a suburban park in Xuzhou, China, in which bird vocalizations were employed as typical biotic sounds. In the experiments, different signal-to-noise ratio conditions were obtained by varying biotic sound intensities while keeping the background noise fixed. Experimental results showed that three indices (acoustic diversity index, acoustic complexity index, and bioacoustic index) decreased while the trend of acoustic evenness index was in the opposite direction as signal-to-noise ratio declined, which was owing to several factors summarized as follows. Firstly, as for acoustic diversity index and acoustic evenness index, the peak value in the spectrogram will no longer correspond to the biotic sounds of interest when signal-to-noise ratio decreases to a certain extent, leading to erroneous results of the proportion of sound occurring in each frequency band. Secondly, in bioacoustic index calculation, the accumulation of the difference between the sound level within each frequency band and the minimum sound level will drop dramatically with reduced biotic sound intensities. Finally, the acoustic complexity index calculation result relies on the ratio between total differences among all adjacent frames and the total sum of all frames within each temporal step and frequency bin in the spectrogram. With signal-to-noise ratio decreasing, the biotic components contribution in both the total differences and the total sum presents a complex impact on the final acoustic complexity index value. This work is helpful to more comprehensively interpret the values of the above acoustic indices in a real-world environment and promote the applications of passive acoustic monitoring in rapid biodiversity assessment.

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Using ecoacoustics metrices to track grassland bird richness across landscape gradients

Cited by 30 publications

References 61 publications

Using Bioacoustics to Examine Vocal Phenology of Neotropical Migratory Birds on a Wild and Scenic River in Arizona

Using Bioacoustics to Examine Vocal Phenology of Neotropical Migratory Birds on a Wild and Scenic River in Arizona

Automated detection of frog calls and choruses by pulse repetition rate

Biotic sound SNR influence analysis on acoustic indices

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