An Educational Guide to :Nature's Orchestra

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An Educational Guide to :Nature's Orchestra An Educational Guide to: Generously supported by: Sounds in Nature Sound is a dynamic and ever-present component of all 1 landscapes . The sounds found in natural ecosystems have been linked to the health and environmental quality of those ecosystems since the publication of Rachel Carson’s 1 pioneering work Silent Spring in 1962 . What is a Soundscape? A “soundscape” is made up of all the sounds found 2 "Every soundscape we hear in a in a particular environment . wild habitat generates its own Those sounds are divided into three major 1 unique signature" - Bernie Krause categories : Biophany - sounds made by living things Check Out: Geophany - nonbiological sounds made by things like wind, rain and thunder The Center for Global Soundscapes www.centerforglobalsoundscapes.org Anthrophony - sounds caused by humans What is Soundscape Ecology? Soundscape ecology can be described as the combination of all sounds (including the biophany, geophany and anthropony) made within a specified landscape that together create sound patterns 1 unique to the time and place . What Can We Learn From Soundscape Ecology? 3 The structure of a landscape, is intricately connected to the soundscape it produces . That soundscape can help indicate not only the types of species present and their population sizes, but can also illustrate the impacts of human-produced sounds on the ecosystem3 . The monitoring of a specific soundscape over time can indicate ecosystem changes such as biodiversity loss, the introduction of new and invasive species, as well as changes in animal behaviours3 . References: 1. Pijanowski, B. C., & Farina, A. (2011). Introduction to the special issue on soundscape ecology. Landscape Ecology, 26(9), 1209-1211 2. Soundscape Ecology at NC State. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://cmast.ncsu.edu/soundscapes/ 3. Farina, A., & Pieretti, N. (2012). The soundscape ecology: A new frontier of landscape research and its application to islands and coastal systems. Journal of Marine and Island Cultures, 1(1), 21-26..
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    Soundscape Ecology “Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.” Rachel Carson – The Silent Spring 1962 Dr. Bryan Pijanowski Department of Forestry & Natural Resources Overview 1. What is a soundscape? 2. Play example soundscapes (5-8 recordings) 3. Describe how we measure soundscapes 4. Summarize some of our research surrounding Purdue University 5. Describe the role of engineers in research like this 1. WHAT IS A SOUNDSCAPE? Biophony – sounds created by biological Soundscapes organisms, mostly insects, amphibians, birds and mammals. Signals carry information and are thus complex. Geophony – sounds from the movement of wind and water. Driven mostly by climate. Running streams, rain and wind. Anthrophony – sounds by human-made objects such as machines, friction from road noise, bells, sirens. Definitions of Soundscapes • R. Murray Schafer (1994): “the soundscape is any acoustic field of study… We can isolate an acoustic environment as a field of study just as we can study the characteristics of a given landscape. However, it is less easy to formulate an exact impression of a soundscape than of a landscape” (p. 7). • Bernie Krause (1987, 2002): all of the sounds (biophony, geophony and anthrophony) present in an environment at a given time, soundscape as a finite resource-competing for spectral space (acoustic niche hypothesis). What it is not • Bioacoustics: traditionally focused on species specific traits or a single group of organisms – this is a 70 year old field of study • Noise research: examining how noise is created in human-dominated areas 2.
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  • A Synthesis of Health Benefits of Natural Sounds and Their Distribution in National Parks
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