Marine Mammal and Marine Bioacoustics Laboratory, Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Sanya, China.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
PLoS One. 2020 Aug 12;15(8):e0236938. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236938. eCollection 2020.
Little is known about the characteristics of ambient sound in shallow waters southwest of Hainan Island, China, a tropical habitat of the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin. The spatiotemporal patterns of soundscape in this area were thus studied and described here. Acoustic data collected from February 2018 to February 2019 at ten monitoring sites, spanning ~200 km of the coastline, were analyzed. The ambient sound characteristics in the investigated area showed significant spatiotemporal variations. Sound levels centered at 0.5 and 1 kHz were higher during dusk and night than other times of the day at all monitoring sites except for one. Higher sound levels at frequencies above 8 kHz were documented during autumn and winter at all sites except for three of them. Biological and anthropogenic sound sources including soniferous fishes, snapping shrimps, dolphins, ships, pile-driving activities, and explosions were identified during spectrogram analyses of a subsample of the dataset. The shipping noise was frequently detected throughout the monitoring sites. Spatiotemporal variations of the soundscape in the investigated waters provided baseline information on the local marine environment, which will be beneficial to the protection of the vulnerable Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin population recently discovered in the investigated waters.
在中国海南岛西南部的浅水区，人们对环境声音的特征知之甚少，而该地区是印度洋-太平洋驼背豚的热带栖息地。因此，本研究对该地区的声音景观时空模式进行了研究和描述。对 2018 年 2 月至 2019 年 2 月在十个监测点采集的声学数据进行了分析，这些监测点分布在约 200 公里的海岸线上。调查区域的环境声音特征表现出显著的时空变化。除了一个监测点外，所有监测点在黄昏和夜间的 0.5 和 1 kHz 中心声级均高于其他时段。除了其中三个监测点外，所有监测点在秋季和冬季的 8 kHz 以上频率的声级都较高。在对数据集的一个子样本的声谱图分析中，识别出了包括发声鱼类、 snapping 虾、海豚、船只、打桩活动和爆炸在内的生物和人为声源。在整个监测点都能频繁检测到船舶噪声。调查水域声音景观的时空变化为当地海洋环境提供了基线信息，这将有利于保护最近在调查水域发现的脆弱的印度洋-太平洋驼背豚种群。
