Giacomo Delgado (above) walked hundreds of kilometers around the forests of Costa Rica
James Dineen
Giacomo Delgado lost his microphone. He was peering into the cloud forest of Costa Rica’s Barba Volcano when his GPS device told him it was somewhere nearby. But the only note he left when he put the microphone here was that it was attached to a moss-covered tree. This is useful, except that it describes almost every tree in the old forest. He narrowed his eyes. He said, “I hate not being able to give myself good notes.”
For the past two months, Delgado, a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and two other teams from universities in Costa Rica have been traveling throughout Costa Rica recording forest soundscapes. The study involved placing microphones at more than 600 locations in all types of forest ecosystems in Costa Rica, making it in some ways the largest “ecoacoustics” study of its kind ever.
This research is part of a shift in the way we monitor ecosystems. Cheaper audio recorders and improved methods of analyzing complex acoustic data using machine learning have led to a boom in the field. And increasingly, researchers are listening to ecosystems and how they are changing and monitoring their health.
In Costa Rica, researchers aim to measure the extent to which ecosystems across the country are recovering by comparing the soundscapes of regenerating forests with those of forests with intact biodiversity. . Forest restoration restores the full diversity of ecosystems. But this…
Source: www.newscientist.com
