Effectiveness of acoustic indices as indicators of vertebrate biodiversity

Allen-Ankins, Slade, McKnight, Donald T., Nordberg, Eric J., Hoefer, Sebastian, Roe, Paul, Watson, David M., McDonald, Paul G., Fuller, Richard A., and Schwarzkopf, Lin (2023) Effectiveness of acoustic indices as indicators of vertebrate biodiversity. Ecological Indicators, 147 (March). 109937.

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Abstract

Effective monitoring tools are key for tracking biodiversity loss and informing management intervention strategies. Passive acoustic monitoring promises to provide a cheap and effective way to monitor biodiversity across large spatial and temporal scales, however, extracting useful information from long-duration audio recordings still proves challenging. Recently, a range of acoustic indices have been developed, which capture different aspects of the soundscape, and may provide a way to estimate traditional biodiversity measures. Here we investigated the relationship between 13 acoustic indices obtained from passive acoustic monitoring and biodiversity estimates of various vertebrate taxonomic groupings obtained from manual surveys at six sites spanning over 20 degrees of latitude along the Australian east coast. We found a number of individual acoustic indices that correlated well with species richness, Shannon's diversity index, and total individual count estimates obtained from traditional survey methods. Correlations were typically greater for avian and total vertebrate biodiversity than for anuran and non-avian vertebrate biodiversity. Acoustic indices also correlated better with species richness and total individual count than with Shannon's diversity index. Random forest models incorporating multiple acoustic indices provided more accurate predictions than single indices alone. Out of the acoustic indices tested, cluster count, mid-frequency cover and spectral density contributed the greatest predictive ability to models. Our results suggest that models incorporating multiple acoustic indices could be a useful tool for monitoring certain vertebrate groups. Further work is required to understand how site-specific variables can be incorporated into models to improve predictive capabilities and how to improve the monitoring of taxa besides avians, particularly anurans.

Item ID: 78388
Item Type: Article (Research - C1)
ISSN: 1872-7034
Keywords: Ecoacoustics, Passive acoustic monitoring, Random forest, Species richness, Terrestrial vertebrate surveys
Copyright Information: © 2023 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/).
Funders: Australian Research Council (ARC)
Projects and Grants: ARC 200101365
Date Deposited: 16 Oct 2023 01:38
FoR Codes: 41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4104 Environmental management > 410401 Conservation and biodiversity @ 100%
SEO Codes: 18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1806 Terrestrial systems and management > 180606 Terrestrial biodiversity @ 100%
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