Kind: captions
Language: en
you've heard of
Landscapes this is a soundscape and like
landscape soundscapes capture a single
Moment In Time by recording what's
making all that noise scientists can use
these sound snapshots to monitor how the
environment changes it's called
soundscape
ecology so sound is actually a much more
powerful variable for us in the science
community because we can't see
everything Brian panowski is a soundc
ecologist he and his research assistant
Matt Harris base their operations at
Purdue University in Indiana but their
team uses microphones set up in
ecosystems all over the world
fundamentally what we're very interested
in is how do sounds reflect the
ecosystem their function the Dynamics
and the the ways in which humans impact
those ecosystems every sound in an
ecosystem falls into one of three
categories ories first there's the
geophysical that's the wind or thunder
or the sound of water running in a
stream then there's the biological the
birds or frogs or crickets the third
layer that we're very interested in is
the one that just happened right now the
sounds produced by humans the sounds of
of sirens church bells road noise the
combination of sounds in a given
location produce a sort of signature for
that ecosystem which can be visualized
in something called a spectum
panowski research shows that in really
diverse ecosystems the spectrogram holds
many different frequencies on the other
hand areas disturbed by humans have less
active and less diverse
soundscapes why well let's say a highway
gets built through this rainforest the
sound of cars might drown out certain
animals mating calls other animals will
have lost habitat or resources due to
construction while some animals will
adapt Say by changing the frequency of
their call
others won't be so lucky their
frequencies will drop out of the
soundscape all
together just observing the environment
might not immediately reveal these
subtle changes but listening to how the
soundscape changes over time can tell
you who's thriving who's struggling and
who's simply gone in the past people
might have gone out into the Wilderness
and recorded their observations and
their notes what soundscape ecology
allows us to do is we can go out and
deploy sensors in many different
locations then we have that crystallized
forever and we can go back to it and and
really dig in depth into the problem
that we're studying the problems are
about as varied as the ecosystems in
Arizona they're wondering if they can
hear ecosystem recovery after a wildfire
and in Costa Rica how is climate change
affecting water flow but changes to the
sound of an environment don't just
influence wildlife panowski says it has
an effect on humans too are we becoming
so removed from nature that we don't
realize that the noise that is all
around us is truly a problem it forces
us almost to turn off our
[Music]
ears