Exploring the biodiversity in Alas Purwo National Park, East Java through soundscape ecology

Biodiversity assessment is becoming one important things to do, to conserve ecosystem. Biodiversity assessment's new method was utilized the nature sounds which is produced by animals in an ecosystem. There are three possibilities sounds sources in an ecosystem, they are: biophonies, geophonies, and anthrophonies, those sound sources will reflect environment acoustics characteristics, called Soundscape. This paper utilized the Soundscape method to predict biodiversity in a forest. Alas Purwo National Park, Banyuwangi, East Java was the location where soundscape data were collected for several days. The soundscape data was processed using R-Statistical Computing Environment software to compute some index values of Bioacoustics Index (BIO), Acoustic Entropy (H), Acoustic Evenness Index (AEI) and Normalized Difference Soundscape Index (NDSI). These indices enabled to characterize the forest in Alas Purwo National Park, East Java, Indonesia for several types of forests selected. The AEI value of 0.69 indicate inequality between frequency bands. The BIO value of 10.79 indicate a forest that is dominant of biotic component. The H value of 0.88 indicate more diverse biotic components. The NDSI value of 0.97 indicate a forest that is dominant with biophonies rather than antrophonies. The results have indicated that some indices (AEI and BIO) could reflect the biodiversity in selected ecosystem, but other indices (H and NDSI) showed anomaly result because of difference landscape between selected ecosystem and ecosystem's weather when data collecting period.