Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, 406 Robertson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08540, U.S.A.
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science School, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane QLD 4001, Australia.
Conserv Biol. 2018 Feb;32(1):205-215. doi: 10.1111/cobi.12968. Epub 2017 Oct 31.
There is global concern about tropical forest degradation, in part, because of the associated loss of biodiversity. Communities and indigenous people play a fundamental role in tropical forest management and are often efficient at preventing forest degradation. However, monitoring changes in biodiversity due to degradation, especially at a scale appropriate to local tropical forest management, is plagued by difficulties, including the need for expert training, inconsistencies across observers, and lack of baseline or reference data. We used a new biodiversity remote-sensing technology, the recording of soundscapes, to test whether the acoustic saturation of a tropical forest in Papua New Guinea decreases as land-use intensity by the communities that manage the forest increases. We sampled soundscapes continuously for 24 hours at 34 sites in different land-use zones of 3 communities. Land-use zones where forest cover was fully retained had significantly higher soundscape saturation during peak acoustic activity times (i.e., dawn and dusk chorus) compared with land-use types with fragmented forest cover. We conclude that, in Papua New Guinea, the relatively simple measure of soundscape saturation may provide a cheap, objective, reproducible, and effective tool for monitoring tropical forest deviation from an intact state, particularly if it is used to detect the presence of intact dawn and dusk choruses.
全球对热带森林退化表示关注，部分原因是生物多样性的相关丧失。社区和土著人民在热带森林管理中发挥着至关重要的作用，他们通常能够有效地防止森林退化。然而，监测由于退化导致的生物多样性变化，特别是在适合当地热带森林管理的规模上，存在诸多困难，包括需要专家培训、观测者之间的不一致性以及缺乏基线或参考数据。我们使用了一种新的生物多样性遥感技术，即记录声音景观，来测试管理森林的社区的土地利用强度增加是否会导致巴布亚新几内亚的热带森林声音景观饱和度降低。我们在 3 个社区的不同土地利用区的 34 个地点连续 24 小时对声音景观进行了采样。在高峰期（即黎明和黄昏合唱），与森林覆盖破碎的土地利用类型相比，森林覆盖率完全保留的土地利用区的声音景观饱和度明显更高。我们的结论是，在巴布亚新几内亚，声音景观饱和度这一相对简单的衡量标准可能为监测热带森林偏离完整状态提供一种廉价、客观、可重复和有效的工具，特别是如果它被用来检测完整的黎明和黄昏合唱的存在。
