Tools for acoustic biodiversity assessment and acoustic habitat quality
Given the current increase in habitat loss in marine environments, the need for an efficient measure with which communities can be monitored is becoming more and more urgent. Passive acoustic methods are a highly effective and non-invasive tool to monitor species presence of sound-producing species in underwater environments.
Our work explores how passive acoustic recordings and acoustic metrics can be used to rapidly extract information on aquatic acoustic diversity, species assemblage rules and community structure.
Further work evolves around the development of new measures for a hitherto virtually neglected marine ecosystem property: the acoustic quality of underwater habitats. Increased anthropogenic underwater noise is of rising concern, as this has been shown to affect many marine animals, ranging from large mammals to bottom dwelling invertebrates. The passive use of sound plays a major role as information source for many aquatic animals, whereas active sound is used for communication purposes in many species. The presence of background noise can therefore have significant adverse effects on communities, fitness and populations. Assessing underwater acoustic habitat quality will involve mapping of both natural and anthropogenic sound sources from a (virtually) acoustically pristine and affected area to examine how patterns in species composition differ in relation to noise budget.
Our team for Marine Acoustic Underwater Diversity (MAUD)
News and articles on the topic
Ice Melting Into Music
Close your eyes for a moment and listen to the space you are in. Maybe you hear colleagues talking in the hall, the purr of a hard disc spinning, rain hitting the window, or when in the field the humming of a research vessel’s engine, with the hint of breaking waves against your cabin window. The world around us is full of sound and we are often only partly aware of the important role it plays in the perception of our environment and the information we implicitly derive from it.