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The Miombo Woodlands of Tanzania comprise several habitat types that are home to a great number of flora and fauna. Understanding their responses to increasing human disturbance is important for conservation, especially in places where people depend so directly on their local ecosystem services to survive. Soundscapes are a powerful approach to study complex biomes undergoing change. The sounds emitted by soniferous fauna characterize the acoustic profile of the landscapes they inhabit such that habitats with the highest acoustic abundance are considered as the most diverse and possibly more ecologically resilient. However, acoustic variability within similar habitat types may pose a challenge not only in determining their pristine condition but also in acoustically detecting their ecological change. The study presented here attempts to assess the soundscapes across habitat types in the Miombo Woodlands of the Issa Valley, Tanzania. A set of 24-hour audio recordings was collected using passive acoustic recorders over an area of 18000 km2. Sites were clustered based on acoustic indices that quantified sound diversity, and this cluster was compared to a similar cluster based on habitat physical attributes calculated using MODIS imagery and geographic information systems. The culminating analysis is a statistical correlation between habitats as defined by their soundscapes and by their landscape attributes. Results indicate acoustic variability was greater in dense canopy habitats and that wetland soundscapes are strongly correlated to the landscape attributes. More analysis need to be done to detect further ecological factors affecting the soundscape in places where the variability was high.

This study examines how the vertical structure of forests and the variation in forest canopy tree composition relates to where forest plant invasions occur at a regional scale. We used LiDAR data on vertical structure of forests collected across 16 counties of western North Carolina, and Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) abundance data of invasive plant species and canopy tree species from 575 plots. We found that nearly one third of these plots were invaded by at least one invasive plant species (range = 1 to 8 species). We derived canopy gaps/clear-cut areas of the study site using LiDAR data matrix (RH100) and 2006 NLCD image to compare invasive species richness at the vegetation gap and closed canopy areas. The most frequently occurring invasive species of the 22 recorded invasive species in the vegetation gap and closed canopy areas were Lonicera japonica (Japanese honeysuckle; 67% & 49%), Rosa spp. (non-native rose; 58% & 51%) and Ligustrum sinense (Chinese privet; 36% & 25%) respectively. Majority of invasive species in both vegetation gap and closed canopy areas are dispersed by birds/ small mammals. Preliminary results suggest that plots in areas having greater forest structural complexity have less invasive plant species present. A variety of mechanisms can explain how forest structural complexity may impact invasivability. We conclude by summarizing these possible mechanisms and the role that LiDAR can play in studying and managing forested landscapes threatened by invasive species.

Rapidly advancing sensor technologies have allowed ecologists to now capture many elements of nature - visually and acoustically – in digital form. Ecologists are becoming increasingly aware that the amount of “pure, untouched nature” is dwindling. In addition, our society is has transitioned to be an urban species that surrounds itself with the sounds of the built environment that disconnects us from nature. Our “ear bud” society in the future may only be able to experience nature through artificial means, in digital form, making us dependent only on past recordings of “pure nature” to know and experience what nature has to offer us for spiritual and recreational enjoyment. To inspire people to “turn their ears back on” and make them more aware of the wondrous sounds that nature has to offer people, I will discuss recordings that I have made and multi-media visuals that have been produced that showcase the beauty of nature. A discussion will follow that seek to generate ideas for how we can best protect the remaining natural, pure soundscapes and how we can best increase public awareness that nature’s sounds are precious.

Poster presented in the: "2010 FNR Research Symposium" of the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN. 16 April 2010 The software described has been published in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America (93:71–81. doi:10.1890/0012-9623-93.1.71). The source code and more info at the project's website: http://pumilio.sourceforge.net

The goal of this project is to analyze the relationship between the slope of land and agricultural land use. The output was analyzed to determine a threshold point at which agriculture practices drop off in relation to higher slope values. Slope of the land is important to agricultural practices because it impacts drainage and net crop primary production. Agricultural land was extracted from the 2001 National Land Cover Dataset using reclassification tools in ArcGIS 9.3. The slope of the contiguous United States was derived from the United States Geological Survey National Elevation Dataset by using the slope tool in the spatial analyst toolbox. Agricultural land was multiplied by the slope in order to determine the amount of agriculture for each degree of slope. The results of this project will be used to help guide future land use models.

Climate change, land use change and the introduction of exotic species are the three most important anthropogenic threats to the ecosystems and their biodiversity. In order to evaluate the impacts these threats are having, ecologists need better methods to measure, in space and time, the biodiversity in a fast and scalable way. Our group is proposing the use of the sounds produced by animals in a landscape, the biophony, as a proxy for the biodiversity. As a first step in the quantification of biophony, we collected sound recordings from seven sites in the Tippecanoe County, Indiana. These sites were located across a gradient of land use categories, from forests and wetlands to agricultural fields. At each site we recorded the sounds during 15 minutes of every hour, from the beginning of Spring until the end of Fall. These recordings were analyzed by extracting the proportion of the time and frequency ranges that the sounds occupied as a biophony score. We found that the biophony was higher in the forests and wetlands than in the agricultural fields. In addition, we found that the biophony follows the same pattern as the biodiversity in the area, with peaks at dawn, from the bird activity, and after sunset, from the frogs and insects. These sound recordings of this pilot project will allow us to further refine the analysis tools as well as improve out understanding of the sound diversity and its usefulness as a proxy in the measurement of the biodiversity at the landscape scale.

Humans have altered the Earth’s ecosystems and biodiversity significantly. With the conversion of land and the loss of biodiversity, the world loses its natural sounds. The loss of natural sounds is compounded by the growing intrusions of motorized noise. Noise pollution is a ubiquitous problem in cities around the world, but the issue is spreading to more remote areas due to expanding transportation networks, motorized recreation and urban sprawl. The U.S. National Park Service (NPS) recognizes park soundscapes, or entire acoustic environment of a given area, as resources just as air and water are resources. However, national park resources are only provided protection within a legally defined boundary separating it from surrounding land uses. To better understand the acoustic resources and noise issues in parks, the U.S. NPS Natural Sounds Program sent a survey to each of the park units (n=391) in 2009. There were 149 respondents representing 141 different park units. We analyzed the data using qualitative theme identification and quantitative analyses. The primary noise impacts for parks were from motorized noise sources (n=97), and specifically road noise was reported by 36 respondents. Adjacent land uses were identified as causing specific impacts by 15 respondents. We demonstrate how Geographic Information Systems can be used to quantify the noise impacts from surrounding development mentioned by park respondents. We buffered urban land use of responding park units using ArcGIS. The total urban area of each park unit was compared to survey results to determine if urban area correlated to parks conducting noise mitigation measures. Respondents (n=14) mentioned adjacent land use planning as a measure that they were using to mitigate noise impacts. The research findings from this study will help guide future soundscape conservation efforts by NPS.

In this study we determine the areal footprint of parking lots in the Great Lakes Basinand outline policies to provide smart growth of parking lots. Our poster addresses the question: “what is the areal footprint and the ensuing economic and ecological consequences of parking lots?”. Our research addresses whether land use in the in the Great Lakes is efficient and sustainable. To that end, we use high resolution aerial photography and GIS to estimate the areal footprint of parking lots in relationship to: (1) the total urban area; (2) the number of parking spaces versus the population of the county; and (3) the distribution of parking spaces by land use category for a high density urban cover portion of the study area. Finally, we develop a set of metrics useful to relate our findings to urban planners and county regulators and 4) we outline the necessary steps to extrapolate our findings to the United States scale and from that draw conclusions as to a possible sustainable path to controlled growth.