Ecoacoustics: A Quantitative Approach to Investigate the Ecological Role of Environmental Sounds

Almo Farina
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Almo Farina: Department of Basic and Applied Sciences, University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”, 61029 Urbino, Italy

Mathematics, 2018, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-16

Abstract: Ecoacoustics is a recent ecological discipline focusing on the ecological role of sounds. Sounds from the geophysical, biological, and anthropic environment represent important cues used by animals to navigate, communicate, and transform unknown environments in well-known habitats. Sounds are utilized to evaluate relevant ecological parameters adopted as proxies for biodiversity, environmental health, and human wellbeing assessment due to the availability of autonomous audio recorders and of quantitative metrics. Ecoacoustics is an important ecological tool to establish an innovative biosemiotic narrative to ensure a strategic connection between nature and humanity, to help in-situ field and remote-sensing surveys, and to develop long-term monitoring programs. Acoustic entropy, acoustic richness, acoustic dissimilarity index, acoustic complexity indices ( ACIt f and ACIf t and their evenness), normalized difference soundscape index, ecoacoustic event detection and identification routine, and their fractal structure are some of the most popular indices successfully applied in ecoacoustics. Ecoacoustics offers great opportunities to investigate ecological complexity across a full range of operational scales (from individual species to landscapes), but requires an implementation of its foundations and of quantitative metrics to ameliorate its competency on physical, biological, and anthropic sonic contexts.

Keywords: ecoacoustics; soundscape; ecoacoustic metrics; acoustic complexity index; ecoacoustic events; acoustic monitoring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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