Contact Rick

Museum of Comparative Zoology
Harvard University
26 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Rick Stanley '12


I am interested in the use of bioacoustics in assessing and monitoring tropical biodiversity. I spent the summer of 2009 making recordings in the Peruvian Amazon, and I plan on returning there to gather more data on Amazonia’s soundscapes. In addition to my acoustic work, I am beginning a project to photograph the biodiversity of the Los Amigos-Tambopata Corridor for the Amazon Conservation Association.

How much can you tell about the health of a forest by the way it sounds? Sounds can disclose the identity of calling species, but how accurate a window do they provide on ecosystems as a whole and their biodiversity? Do diagnostic changes in soundscapes occur in relation to the severity or type of forest disturbance? Which calling species serve as the best indicators of ecosystem health? These lines of inquiry hold much promise for biodiversity monitoring in the Amazon.1

Acoustic surveys have a number of advantages over other methods. They are easily standardized for comparison with other studies (a stationary microphone eliminates the variable of a researcher’s collecting ability). They are also nonintrusive and allow for the detection of cryptic or arboreal species that would otherwise escape notice. Many frogs and crickets, readily identifiable by their calls, may serve as particularly sensitive indicator species. If automatic call recognition (ACR) were perfected, acoustic surveys would also be simple and cost-effective.2 There are too many species in the rainforest to monitor them all, so cost-effective means of surveying indicator taxa are a conservation priority.3

 

1. Riede, K (1993). Monitoring Biodiversity: Analysis of Amazonian Rainforest Sounds. Ambio, Vol. 22, No. 8, pp. 546-548.

2. Brandes, T S; Naskrecki, P; Figueroa, H K (2006). Detecting narrow-band calls with image processing. J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 120, No. 5.

3. Forsyth, A B and Spector, S. "Indicator Taxa for Biodiversity Assessment in the Vanishing Tropics." Conservation in a Changing World. Ed. Georgina M. Mace. UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998