Computing biodiversity change via a soundscape monitoring network

Abstract

A monitoring network for biodiversity change is essential for wildlife conservation. In recent years, many soundscape monitoring projects have been carried out to investigate the diversity of vocalizing animals. However, the acoustic-based biodiversity assessment remains challenging due to the lack of sufficient recognition database and the inability to disentangle mixed sound sources. Since 2014, an Asian Soundscape monitoring project has been initiated in Taiwan. So far, there are 15 recording sites in Taiwan and three sites in Southeast Asia, with more than 20,000 hours of recordings archived in the Asian Soundscape. In this study, we employed the visualization of long-duration recordings, blind source separation, and clustering techniques, to investigate the spatio-temporal variations of forest biodiversity in the Triangle Mountain, Lienhuachih, and T aipingshan. On the basis of blind source separation, biological sounds, with prominent diurnal occurrence pattern, can be separated from the environmental sounds without any recognition database. Thus, clusters of biological sounds can be effectively identified and employed to measure the daily change in bioacoustic diversity. Our results show that the bioacoustic diversity was higher in the evergreen broad-leaved forest. However, the seasonal variation in bioacoustic diversity was most evident in the high elevation coniferous forest. This study demonstrates that a suitable integration of machine learning and ecoacoustics can facilitate the evaluation of biodiversity changes. In addition to biological activities, we can also measure the environmental variability from soundscape information. In the future, the Asian Soundscape will not only serve as an open database for soundscape recordings, but also will provide tools for analyzing the interactions between biodiversity, environment, and human activities.