Howells Nia, Lees Alexander Charles, Barlow Jos, Berenguer Erika, Rossi Liana Chesini, Sueur Jérôme, Sullivan Martin J, Gabriel Ramos Yan, Metcalf Oliver C
Department of Natural Sciences, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, M1 5GD, UK.
Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancashire, UK.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2025 Jun 12;380(1928):20240337. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2024.0337.
Insects are one of the most diverse taxa and are fundamental to the delivery of many ecosystem services. Despite their global ubiquity and ecological importance, there is little research on temporal variation in insect activity, especially in the tropics where the group is most diverse. Gaps in our knowledge of insects are compounded by a lack of robust methods to monitor their activity at fine timescales. Ecoacoustic techniques have emerged as an effective means to monitor a range of taxa over long periods. Here, we assess insect acoustic activity in the eastern Brazilian Amazon across daily and seasonal cycles over 2 years. We relate acoustic indices to two subsets of manually assessed activity-sonotype diversity and spectrogram coverage. We find evidence for daily and seasonal periodicity, with both the spectrogram coverage and number of insect sonotypes higher nocturnally. Insect acoustic activity peaks during the dry season. Of the five acoustic indices used, the Bioacoustic Index best predicted acoustic insect activity across both metrics. Our results indicate that passive acoustic monitoring can be an effective tool for assessing broad trends in insect phenology.This article is part of the theme issue 'Acoustic monitoring for tropical ecology and conservation'.
昆虫是种类最为多样的生物类群之一，对许多生态系统服务的提供至关重要。尽管它们在全球范围内广泛存在且具有生态重要性，但关于昆虫活动的时间变化，尤其是在该类群最为多样的热带地区，相关研究却很少。由于缺乏在精细时间尺度上监测昆虫活动的可靠方法，我们对昆虫的了解存在诸多空白。生态声学技术已成为长期监测一系列生物类群的有效手段。在此，我们评估了巴西东部亚马逊地区昆虫在两年时间里的每日和季节性周期的声学活动。我们将声学指标与人工评估活动的两个子集——声型多样性和频谱图覆盖率联系起来。我们发现了每日和季节性周期性的证据，频谱图覆盖率和昆虫声型数量在夜间均更高。昆虫声学活动在旱季达到峰值。在所使用的五个声学指标中，生物声学指数在这两个指标上对昆虫声学活动的预测效果最佳。我们的结果表明，被动声学监测可以成为评估昆虫物候广泛趋势的有效工具。本文是主题为“热带生态与保护的声学监测”的一部分。
