For anyone who doesn’t like cartoons, this looks a lot cuter than the information it conveys,
An August 16, 2024 news item on ScienceDaily announces the work,
Barely audible to human ears, healthy soils produce a cacophony of sounds in many forms—a bit like an underground rave concert of bubble pops and clicks.
Special recordings made by Flinders University ecologists in Australia show that this chaotic mixture of soundscapes can be a measure of the diversity of tiny living animals in the soil, which create sounds as they move and interact with their environment.
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An August 16, 2024 Flinders University press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, describes a newish (more about newish later) field of research ‘eco-acoustics’ and technical details about the researchers’ work, Note: A link has been removed,
With 75% of the world’s soils degraded, the future of the teeming community of living species that live underground face a dire future without restoration, says microbial ecologist Dr Jake Robinson, from the Frontiers of Restoration Ecology Lab in the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University.
This new field of research aims to investigate the vast, teeming hidden ecosystems where almost 60% of the Earth’s species live, he says.
“Restoring and monitoring soil biodiversity has never been more important.
“Although still in its early stages, ‘eco-acoustics’ is emerging as a promising tool to detect and monitor soil biodiversity and has now been used in Australian bushland and other ecosystems in the UK.
“The acoustic complexity and diversity are significantly higher in revegetated and remnant plots than in cleared plots, both in-situ and in sound attenuation chambers.
“The acoustic complexity and diversity are also significantly associated with soil invertebrate abundance and richness.”
The latest study, including Flinders University expert Associate Professor Martin Breed and Professor Xin Sun from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, compared results from acoustic monitoring of remnant vegetation to degraded plots and land that was revegetated 15 years ago.
The passive acoustic monitoring used various tools and indices to measure soil biodiversity over five days in the Mount Bold region in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia. A below-ground sampling device and sound attenuation chamber were used to record soil invertebrate communities, which were also manually counted.
“It’s clear acoustic complexity and diversity of our samples are associated with soil invertebrate abundance – from earthworms, beetles to ants and spiders – and it seems to be a clear reflection of soil health,” says Dr Robinson.
“All living organisms produce sounds, and our preliminary results suggest different soil organisms make different sound profiles depending on their activity, shape, appendages and size.
“This technology holds promise in addressing the global need for more effective soil biodiversity monitoring methods to protect our planet’s most diverse ecosystems.”
This is a copy of the research paper’s graphical abstract,
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Sounds of the underground reflect soil biodiversity dynamics across a grassy woodland restoration chronosequence by Jake M. Robinson, Alex Taylor, Nicole Fickling, Xin Sun, Martin F. Breed. Journal of Applied Ecology Volume 61, Issue 9 September 2024 Pages 2047-2060 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14738 First published online: 15 August 2024
This paper is open access.
‘Newish’ eco-acoustics
Like a lot of newish scientific terms, eco-acoustics, appears to be evolving. A search for the term led me to the Acoustic ecology entry on Wikipedia, Note: Links have been removed,
Acoustic ecology, sometimes called ecoacoustics or soundscape studies, is a discipline studying the relationship, mediated through sound, between human beings and their environment.[1] Acoustic ecology studies started in the late 1960s with R. Murray Schafer a musician, composer and former professor of communication studies at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) with the help of his team there[2] as part of the World Soundscape Project. The original WSP team included Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp, Bruce Davies and Peter Huse, among others. The first study produced by the WSP was titled The Vancouver Soundscape. This innovative study raised the interest of researchers and artists worldwide, creating enormous growth in the field of acoustic ecology. In 1993, the members of the by now large and active international acoustic ecology community formed the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.[3]
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Soundscapes are composed of the anthrophony, geophony and biophony of a particular environment. They are specific to location and change over time.[12] Acoustic ecology aims to study the relationship between these things, i.e. the relationship between humans, animals and nature, within these soundscapes. These relationships are delicate and subject to disruption by natural or man-made means.[9]
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The acoustic niche hypothesis, as proposed by acoustic ecologist Bernie Krause in 1993,[23] refers to the process in which organisms partition the acoustic domain, finding their own niche in frequency and/or time in order to communicate without competition from other species. The theory draws from the ideas of niche differentiation and can be used to predict differences between young and mature ecosystems. Similar to how interspecific competition can place limits on the number of coexisting species that can utilize a given availability of habitats or resources, the available acoustic space in an environment is a limited resource that is partitioned among those species competing to utilize it.[24]
In mature ecosystems, species will sing at unique bandwidths and specific times, displaying a lack of interspecies competition in the acoustic environment. Conversely, in young ecosystems, one is more likely to encounter multiple species using similar frequency bandwidths, which can result in interference between their respective calls, or a complete lack of activity in uncontested bandwidths. Biological invasions can also result in interference in the acoustic niche, with non-native species altering the dynamics of the native community by producing signals that mask or degrade native signals. This can cause a variety of ecological impacts, such as decreased reproduction, aggressive interactions, and altered predator-prey dynamics.[25] The degree of partitioning in an environment can be used to indicate ecosystem health and biodiversity.
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Earlier bioacoustic research at Flinders University has been mentioned in a June 14, 2023 posting “The sound of dirt.” Finally, whether you spell it eco-acoustics or ecoacoustics or call it acoustic ecology, it is a fascinating way of understanding the natural and not-so-natural world we live in.