Can we measure the health of our planet just by listening to it?
In short: Ecoacoustics promises a scalable way to track biodiversity by monitoring ecosystem sounds. While researchers are using live audio from rewilding projects like Knepp to reconnect the public with nature, scientific analysis suggests that soundscapes are better at tracking community change than predicting exact species richness across different global environments.
The practice of ecoacoustics involves using sound to understand ecosystems, from the Ecuadorian Amazon to the Scottish Cairngorms. At the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, researchers have launched Wilding Radio, a 24-hour live stream that captures the sounds of a rewilding landscape. By placing microphones in tree canopies and hydrophones underwater, the project allows listeners to hear everything from nightingales and turtle doves to the activity of beavers, which are actively shaping the wetland habitat.
While these soundscapes offer a powerful tool for public engagement and monitoring local recovery, their scientific application remains complex. A recent study analyzing over 8,000 audio recordings across four diverse global datasets—ranging from temperate forests in the USA to tropical landscapes in India, Malaysia, and Taiwan—found that common acoustic indices do not reliably predict species richness across different sites. While many features correlate with biodiversity within a single dataset, these relationships often fail to generalize, meaning a soundscape metric that works in one forest may be useless in another.
Despite these limitations, the study confirms that changes in soundscapes are a consistent indicator of shifts in community composition. This suggests that while we cannot yet use a single universal metric to count species richness, acoustic monitoring remains a valuable, inexpensive way to track how ecosystems evolve over time. As human-driven biodiversity loss continues, these digital tools provide a way to monitor the rebound of nature, offering a hopeful, if technically challenging, window into the orchestral ensemble of the natural world.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: The sound of biodiversity: Nature soundscapes at Knepp | Field Studies
- Also: “Wilding Radio” from Sussex Uni and Knepp first of its kind
- Also: Limits to the accurate and generalizable use of soundscapes to monitor biodiversity - Nature Ecology & Evolution
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