BEsound: die Beziehungen zwischen Landnutzungsintensität, organismischer Diversität und akustischer Komplexität - ein "Soundscape"-Ansatz für die Biodiversitäts Exploratorien

• Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Michael Scherer-Lorenzen
• Fachliche Zuordnung: Ökologie und Biodiversität der Tiere und Ökosysteme, Organismische Interaktionen ; Ökologie und Biodiversität der Pflanzen und Ökosysteme
• Förderung: Förderung von 2014 bis 2019
• Projektkennung: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 252306891

Within this project we will investigate whether different land-use intensities and management types can be directly related to the soundscape of the respective habitat. Soundscape ecology is a newly emerging scientific field. It is a cross-disciplinary approach, combining landscape ecology, psychoacoustics, bioacoustics and acoustic ecology. It aims to understand how sounds from various sources - biological, geophysical and anthropogenic - can be used to understand coupled natural-human dynamics across different spatial and temporal scales. The established gradients of land use types and biodiversity in forest and grasslands of the Biodiversity Exploratories, combined with the already existing inventories for various organismic groups like birds, different insects and mammals, provide a unique opportunity to test and validate acoustic diversity measures.The main aim is to test the hypotheses that1. acoustic diversity serves as a correlate for several different aspects of biodiversity;2. acoustic diversity is correlated with land use intensity.To achieve these objectives, we will take simultaneous recordings at the three Biodiversity Exploratory sites along the established land-use and biodiversity gradients in both forest and grassland systems (100 EPs per region - total 300 plots). Autonomous recording systems (ARS) will be installed within the plots. By recording the soundscape for a whole year and during several recordings per day, both daily and seasonal variations can be captured to document various aspects of sonic components (e.g. dominance of birds during dawn choruses in spring, insects during summer). The collected data will be used to investigate which organismic groups are captured by acoustic diversity indices. The identity and taxonomic diversity of specific organismic groups will, however, not be derived by these measurements, but will be provided by other projects. In addition, the dataset will allow us to relate different aspects of an ecosystem´s biodiversity and structure, such as plant species diversity, certain aspects of plant functional diversity or canopy architecture to acoustic diversity. The aim is therefore to establish acoustic richness indices as a functional tool to study the correlations between different organismic groups, vegetation structure and their sensitivity to changes in land-use intensity. Recent case studies support the feasibility of such an approach. Applying the concept of soundscape ecology to the unique design of the Biodiversity Exploratories, with multiple levels of land-use intensity, biodiversity and ecosystem type, will allow testing its suitability for detecting consequences of environmental change for biodiversity. By the use of SmartPhones or similar mobile devices the wider public will be included in monitoring the soundscape. Citizen Science has the potential to gather data for long term monitoring on extended spatial scales. It will also contribute to public education.

• DFG-Verfahren: Infrastruktur-Schwerpunktprogramme
• Teilprojekt zu: SPP 1374: Biodiversitäts-Exploratorien
• Internationaler Bezug: Italien
• Beteiligte Personen: Professor Dr. Almo Farina; Dr. Nadia Pieretti