Soundscape Baselines Project
Biodiversity baselines for evidence-based conservation
Together with a network of local scientists, community members, and conservationists, we are establishing biodiversity baselines in the world’s most intact forests. We are spearheading a scalable protocol to collect and analyze soundscapes, images and videos from the baseline sites, using cutting edge technologies and open, modular science.
We are documenting what the world’s most intact forests sound like. Drone photos: Sound Forest Lab and Mongabay.
Vision
The Soundscape Baselines Project aims to develop a robust tool for measuring changes in biodiversity in the world’s forests against rigorous baselines, for the purpose of helping forest conservation efforts worldwide.
Why do we need baselines?
Tropical forests are at the front lines of extinctions of species. Spanning about 12% of Earth’s land, they harbor over half of terrestrial species. Counterintuitively, many conservation efforts in tropical forests do not measure how effective they are in terms of biodiversity protection.
In a quickly changing world, a fundamental problem is knowing what to compare biodiversity to. That is why we are establishing biodiversity baselines, by creating ‘time capsules’ of what the forest sounds like in each location.
We are listening to the forests 24h a day, for a full year.
We are also using camera traps to capture silent wildlife, and remote sensing to look at the canopy. This dataset is unprecedented in its temporal density, and spatial breadth - we are not missing a beat of what goes on in the forest. We can learn so much from the soundscapes, from what a ‘normal’ forest sounds like, to how different animals partition the available bandwith to communicate. We capture the sounds of insects, frogs, birds, as well as mammals. Watch the video below to learn more about bioacoustics, and how it can help conservation.
How can you help?
The pilot phase of this project is sponsored by a grant from the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation. If you’d like to help support the next phase, or see more baseline sites added, please get in touch! Ongoing Soundscape Baseline locations are highlighted below in large circles. Smaller blue dots show where we have preliminary recordings but not a full baseline.
What is the Soundscape Baselines Project?