Dipartimento di Scienze Chimiche, Fisiche, Matematiche e Naturali, Università di Sassari, Sassari, Italy.
National Biodiversity Future Centre, Palermo, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2024 Sep 8;14(1):20910. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-71975-2.
Restoration of vulnerable marine habitats is becoming increasingly popular to cope with widespread habitat loss and the resulting decline in biodiversity and ecosystem services. Lately, restoration strategies have been employed to enhance the recovery of degraded meadows of the Mediterranean endemic seagrass Posidonia oceanica. Typically, habitat restoration success is evaluated by the persistence of foundation species after transplantation (e.g., plant survival and growth) on the short and long-term, although successful plant responses do not necessarily reflect the recovery of ecosystem biodiversity and functions. Recently, soundscape (the spatial, temporal and frequency attribute of ambient sound and types of sound sources characterizing it) has been related to different habitat conditions and community structures. Thus, a successful restoration action should lead to acoustic restoration and soundscape ecology could represent an important component of restoration monitoring, leading to assess successful habitat and community restoration. Here, we evaluated acoustic community and metrics in a P. oceanica restored meadow and tested whether the plant transplant effectiveness after one year was accompanied by a restored soundscape. With this goal, acoustic recordings from degraded, transplanted and reference meadows were collected in Sardinia (Italy) using passive acoustic monitoring devices. Soundscape at each meadow type was examined using both spectral analysis and classification of fish calls based on a catalogue of fish sounds from the Mediterranean Sea. Seven different fish sounds were recorded: most of them were present in the reference and transplanted meadows and were associated to Sciaena umbra and Scorpaena spp. Sound Pressure Level (SPL, in dB re: 1 μPa-rms) and Acoustic Complexity Index (ACI) were influenced by the meadow type. Particularly higher values were associated to the transplanted meadow. SPL and ACI calculated in the 200-2000 Hz frequency band were also related to high abundance of fish sounds (chorus). These results showed that meadow restoration may lead to the recovery of soundscape and the associated community, suggesting that short term acoustic monitoring can provide complementary information to evaluate seagrass restoration success.
恢复脆弱的海洋生境正日益成为应对广泛生境丧失和生物多样性及生态系统服务下降的一种手段。最近，人们采用了恢复策略来促进地中海特有海草波西多尼亚海草退化草地的恢复。通常，栖息地恢复的成功是通过移植后基础物种的持续存在来评估的（例如，植物的存活和生长），无论是短期还是长期，尽管成功的植物响应并不一定反映生态系统生物多样性和功能的恢复。最近，声音景观（环境声音的空间、时间和频率属性以及其特征的声源类型）与不同的栖息地条件和群落结构有关。因此，成功的恢复行动应该导致声学恢复，而声音景观生态学可以成为恢复监测的一个重要组成部分，从而评估成功的栖息地和群落恢复。在这里，我们评估了波西多尼亚海草恢复草地的声学群落和指标，并测试了植物在移植一年后是否具有恢复的声音景观。为此，我们在意大利撒丁岛使用被动声学监测设备，从退化、移植和参考草地收集声学记录。在每种草地类型中，我们通过基于地中海鱼类声音目录的鱼类声音的光谱分析和分类来检查声音景观。记录了七种不同的鱼类声音：其中大多数存在于参考和移植草地中，与乌鲂和石斑鱼属鱼类有关。声压级（SPL，以 1 μPa-rms 为参考的分贝）和声学复杂度指数（ACI）受草地类型的影响。特别是，移植草地的相关值更高。在 200-2000 Hz 频带中计算的 SPL 和 ACI 也与鱼类声音（合唱）的高丰度有关。这些结果表明，草地恢复可能会恢复声音景观和相关群落，这表明短期声学监测可以提供补充信息来评估海草恢复的成功。
