Acoustic Indices in Developed Areas

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is a sampling technique that has gained increasing popularity in the field of wildlife monitoring and research. The technique involves the deployment of programmable ARUs, allowing for non-invasive and cost-effective collection of acoustic information across a breadth of temporal and spatial scales. Retrieving biological information from PAM recordings can often involve time-consuming sound annotation methodologies, but the advent of acoustic indices has allowed for biodiversity metrics to be estimated quickly and with reasonable accuracy. Rebecca Ducay (Current MS student) is developing artificial soundscapes for studying how vehicular noise affects biodiversity estimates from 9 acoustic indices. By contributing to the collective understanding of acoustic index behaviors under anthropogenic noise pollution, we hope to better inform their ecological application within future PAM efforts in human-developed contexts.