@article {57908, title = {The quantitative relation between ambient soundscapes and landscape development intensity in North Central Florida}, journal = {Landscape Ecology}, year = {2019}, month = {Nov-11-2020}, abstract = {

Context

It is widely accepted that wildlife is subjected to detrimental human noise within urban landscapes but little is known about how the intensity of land use changes soundscapes.

Objectives

The objective of this research was to produce quantitative associations between characteristics of ambient soundscapes and land use intensity. These relations were used to examine the 2 kHz demarcation between anthrophony and biophony and compare the impact of different sized contributing areas on ambient soundscape characteristics.

Methods

This study related the surrounding land use intensity of 67 sites in north central Florida (USA) to several metrics describing their recorded soundscapes. Land use intensity was measured remotely at three scales using the landscape development intensity index (LDI).

Results

The analysis revealed that the LDI index had a statistically significant effect on soundscape characteristics after controlling for important factors such as climate, season, and attenuation due to hard ground. The trends between LDI and soundscape confirmed that human generated sounds are loud, continuous, and occupy low frequencies. The evenness of the sound distribution decreased with landscape intensity and LDI correlated significantly with sound below 3 kHz. Land use intensity within a 100 and 500-m radius contributing area were most closely related to soundscape metrics.

Conclusions

LDI is a tool with the potential to predict the extent and intensity of anthropogenic noise disturbance on wildlife from remote sensing data. The utility of this tool allows for widespread application to identify and mitigate conflicts in the acoustic realm between human noise and wildlife.

}, keywords = {Ambient sound, Anthrophony, biophony, Development intensity, LDI index, Noise disturbance, Power spectral density, Remote sensing, Soundscape, Technophony}, issn = {0921-2973}, doi = {10.1007/s10980-019-00936-2}, url = {http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10980-019-00936-2}, author = {Dooley, Jenet M. and Brown, Mark T.} } @article {51472, title = {Acoustic masking of soniferous species of the St-Lawrence lowlands}, journal = {Landscape and Urban Planning}, volume = {168}, year = {2017}, month = {Jan-12-2017}, pages = {31 - 37}, abstract = {

How much of the acoustic resource shared by vocalizing animal species is masked by human-induced noise has become a central question in the emerging field of soundscape ecology. The goal of our study was to evaluate the joint probability that masking could occur for anuran, bird, or stridulating orthopteran species along the spectral, spatial and temporal dimensions of the acoustic space. We evaluated acoustic overlap in the dominant frequencies, absolute amplitudes (emitter-receiver distances), and time-series (temporal match-mismatch) of human- and animal-induced sounds in three landscape settings: urban, peri-urban and rural. Acoustic overlap was evaluated at the day scale during the active vocalizing period of each taxon. Our results suggest that acoustic masking is unlikely for a vast majority of species in the three taxonomic groups; ranging from 5\–7\% for anurans to 3\–4\% for birds and less than 1\% for orthopterans. However, in urban contexts, acoustic masking could be a selective force when coupled to other factors that covary with the amount of noise produced by human activities, such as habitat loss and degradation.

}, keywords = {acoustic masking, biophony, distribution overlap, phenology, soundscapes, urban noise}, issn = {01692046}, doi = {10.1016/j.landurbplan.2017.09.015}, url = {http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0169204617302232}, author = {Desrochers, Louis and Proulx, Rapha{\"e}l} }