The soundscape represents the acoustic footprint of a landscape, and may well be a source of a va... more The soundscape represents the acoustic footprint of a landscape, and may well be a source of a vast amount of information that could be used efficiently in, for example, long-term bird aggregation monitoring schemes. To depict such soundscape footprint, specific indexes ...
Biosemiotics to date has focused on the exchange of signals between organisms, in line with bioac... more Biosemiotics to date has focused on the exchange of signals between organisms, in line with bioacoustics; consideration of the wider acoustic environment as a semiotic medium is under-developed. The nascent discipline of ecoacoustics, that investigates the role of environmental sound in ecological processes and dynamics, fills this gap. In this paper we introduce key ecoacoustic terminology and concepts in order to highlight the value of ecoacoustics as a discipline in which to conceptualise and study intra- and interspecies semiosis. We stress the inherently subjective nature of all sensory scapes (vivo-, land-, vibro- and soundscapes) and propose that they should always bear an organismic attribution. Key terms to describe the sources (geophony, biophony, anthropophony, technophony) and scales (sonotopes, soundtopes, sonotones) of soundscapes are described. We introduce epithets for soundscapes to point to the degree to which the global environment is implicated in semiosis (laten...
Abstract The soundscape was recorded in four
selected places in Sequoia National Park CA, to
quan... more Abstract The soundscape was recorded in four selected places in Sequoia National Park CA, to quantify and assess the diurnal and seasonal character of the park’s soundscape. The recording sites were selected to represent a combination of elevation and vegetation diversity. Hour-long sound recordings were made by four individuals at each place during fall, spring, summer and winter at dawn, midday, dusk, and midnight with identical recording instrumentation. The recordings of the soundscape were made in an old growth forest (Crescent Meadow), in a foothill oak savanna (Sycamore Spring), in an upland savanna chaparral (Shepherd Saddle) and in a foothill riparian location adjacent to the Kiawah River (Buckeye Flat). Sound recordings were analyzed using a normalized Power Spectral Density (PSD) algorithm and partitioned into 1 kHz intervals based on 12 subsamples from each of the 64 h-long sound recordings. Biological signals (biophony) were based on the highest PSD value within the range of 2–8 kHz. A multilevel analysis (MLA) was used to examine temporal patterns of biophony at four locations in Sequoia National Park. Unsupervised Landsat Thematic Mapper Satellite Imagery identified 25 vegetation regimes in Sequoia National Park. Satellite signatures of the habitat where recordings were made were extracted from the imagery to scale to the region.
The word therapeutic science arises from the Greek: Therapeytikè (the art of assistance) and it... more The word therapeutic science arises from the Greek: Therapeytikè (the art of assistance) and its use as an ecological hy-pothesis seems at first a little forced. But the ecosystem services that natural processes provide and offer to humans are not only restricted to air, water ...
Islands and mainland coastal ranges are fragile systems rich in biological endemisms and ecologic... more Islands and mainland coastal ranges are fragile systems rich in biological endemisms and ecological peculiarities. In these environments, the cultural heritage that represents an important component of the overall ecological complexity is under attack from human pressures (urban sprawl, logistics, fish farming and mass tourism). Among the most valuable resources pertaining to these environments, the overall emerging sounds (the soundscape) play a relevant role with respect to the maintenance of the sense of a place and its cultural value. The study of the soundscape requires an epistemology based mainly on the cognitive landscape perspective, and within this theoretical framework, the General Theory of Resources, the Eco-field hypothesis and the soundtope model are also important components. Among the methods used in soundscape ecology, the analysis of the frequency bins of the acoustic spectrogram can provide proxies for understanding and interpreting acoustic patterns and processes in action across a landscape. The description of a case-study from a Tyrrhenian coastal system of Northern Italy, via the use of dedicated software and metrics, briefly illustrates the potential of soundscape ecology, which is entirely suitable for achieving a better understanding of the dynamics of island and mainland coastal systems.
NATO Science for Peace and Security Series C: Environmental Security, 2011
Warfare represents not only tragedies for societies and casualties and suffering for people, but ... more Warfare represents not only tragedies for societies and casualties and suffering for people, but also a great menace to environmental health and most living organisms. In a short time, warfare mobilizes a massive amount of energy, matter and information without a ...
In complete agreement with the thoughts of Kuhn (1962), scientific research simi-larly to other h... more In complete agreement with the thoughts of Kuhn (1962), scientific research simi-larly to other human activities provides a service that is intimately associated with time, place, and culture. In other words, scientific research intercepts the needs of human society and tries to ...
ABSTRACT The Red-billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea) is an invasive species which has recently bee... more ABSTRACT The Red-billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea) is an invasive species which has recently been found to be locally abundant in eastern Liguria (Italy). The song production of this bird was recorded over the course of an entire year (2011) and evaluated using both aural information and applying innovative automatic processing metrics. Our findings revealed that the Red-billed Leiothrix has loud vocalizations that are heard for most of the year, including in July and August when other birds are silent. Its song production has been estimated to amount to 37% of the sounds uttered by the entire bird community. The next most vocal species are the European Robin (36%), the Common Blackbird (18%), the Subalpine Warbler (5%) and the Sardinian Warbler (1%). The Red-billed Leiothrix can be seen as a new acoustically dominant species and, consequently, a potential modifier of the soundscape patterns of the indigenous bird community. The modification of acoustic traits in the repertoire of both indigenous species and the Red-billed Leiothrix is to be expected according to a co-evolution hypothesis.
ABSTRACT Capturing information means for every organism acquiring knowledge about the living and ... more ABSTRACT Capturing information means for every organism acquiring knowledge about the living and not living objects that exist in its surroundings. In this way, the “historical” concept of Umwelt, as a subjective surrounding has been recently integrated in the theory of landscape ecology where a landscape is not only a geographical entity but also a cognitive medium. The landscape may be considered a semiotic context used by the organisms to locate resources heterogeneously distributed in space and time. In particular, inside a landscape there are different eco-fields defined as spatial arrangements of objects carrier of meaning that organisms utilize to track resources. Along this epistemic path the sonic component of the landscape is an important carrier of information commonly used by the majority of animal species to managing many vital functions. In particular birds, which are animals with a complex system of acoustic communication, seem to organize acoustic centers for public information. These sonic patterns (soundtopes) are characterized by a great variability in space and time and function like a special eco-field that allows species to share information about the status of resources and the dynamics of populations. The availability of such public information avoids a deeper and more expensive exploration of the environment to assess its quality.
Human intrusion is growing at an exponential rate modifying structure and functions of many ecosy... more Human intrusion is growing at an exponential rate modifying structure and functions of many ecosystems (loss or reduction of habitats for species, loss of biodiversity) and reducing the ecosystem services. Many modifications are not immediately visible creating an ecological debt ...
ABSTRACT Acoustic codes assure the intra and interspecific communication of vocal animals. They a... more ABSTRACT Acoustic codes assure the intra and interspecific communication of vocal animals. They are composed by a sequence of nominal entities (syllables, words and sentences) and by magnitude modulation confirming in such a way contemporarily a behavioural and ecological nature. The acoustic codes find evidence in the acoustic niche hypothesis by which species in order to reduce interspecific competition (acoustic overlap) occupy a restricted portion of the available frequencies modulating very precise acoustic cues (codes). Their evolution, like other aspect of biology, is under control of the environmental conditions assuming the more favourable configurations. These nominal entities respond also to the amount of energy by which are emitted allowing to the eavesdropping individuals to range the distance at which a potential competitor is broadcasting a signal. Environmental alterations, especially if of anthropogenic origin, can produce severe consequence of the acoustic codes that in turn may affect the prey-predator balance and the complexity of communities. In fact acoustic codes under an environmental constraint like human noise intrusion can be modified in order to reduce a masking effect, demonstrating their phenological plasticity. The new ecological discipline of soundscape ecology offers the possibility to investigate the nature and the evolution of the acoustic codes in different environmental conditions.
In the second chapter, I distinguished at least three possible approaches to under-standing the l... more In the second chapter, I distinguished at least three possible approaches to under-standing the landscape: the Individual-Based Perceptional Landscape (IBPL), the Individual-Based Cognitive Landscape (IBCL), and the Neutrality-Based Landscape (NBL). These three different ...
The soundscape represents the acoustic footprint of a landscape, and may well be a source of a va... more The soundscape represents the acoustic footprint of a landscape, and may well be a source of a vast amount of information that could be used efficiently in, for example, long-term bird aggregation monitoring schemes. To depict such soundscape footprint, specific indexes ...
Biosemiotics to date has focused on the exchange of signals between organisms, in line with bioac... more Biosemiotics to date has focused on the exchange of signals between organisms, in line with bioacoustics; consideration of the wider acoustic environment as a semiotic medium is under-developed. The nascent discipline of ecoacoustics, that investigates the role of environmental sound in ecological processes and dynamics, fills this gap. In this paper we introduce key ecoacoustic terminology and concepts in order to highlight the value of ecoacoustics as a discipline in which to conceptualise and study intra- and interspecies semiosis. We stress the inherently subjective nature of all sensory scapes (vivo-, land-, vibro- and soundscapes) and propose that they should always bear an organismic attribution. Key terms to describe the sources (geophony, biophony, anthropophony, technophony) and scales (sonotopes, soundtopes, sonotones) of soundscapes are described. We introduce epithets for soundscapes to point to the degree to which the global environment is implicated in semiosis (laten...
Abstract The soundscape was recorded in four
selected places in Sequoia National Park CA, to
quan... more Abstract The soundscape was recorded in four selected places in Sequoia National Park CA, to quantify and assess the diurnal and seasonal character of the park’s soundscape. The recording sites were selected to represent a combination of elevation and vegetation diversity. Hour-long sound recordings were made by four individuals at each place during fall, spring, summer and winter at dawn, midday, dusk, and midnight with identical recording instrumentation. The recordings of the soundscape were made in an old growth forest (Crescent Meadow), in a foothill oak savanna (Sycamore Spring), in an upland savanna chaparral (Shepherd Saddle) and in a foothill riparian location adjacent to the Kiawah River (Buckeye Flat). Sound recordings were analyzed using a normalized Power Spectral Density (PSD) algorithm and partitioned into 1 kHz intervals based on 12 subsamples from each of the 64 h-long sound recordings. Biological signals (biophony) were based on the highest PSD value within the range of 2–8 kHz. A multilevel analysis (MLA) was used to examine temporal patterns of biophony at four locations in Sequoia National Park. Unsupervised Landsat Thematic Mapper Satellite Imagery identified 25 vegetation regimes in Sequoia National Park. Satellite signatures of the habitat where recordings were made were extracted from the imagery to scale to the region.
The word therapeutic science arises from the Greek: Therapeytikè (the art of assistance) and it... more The word therapeutic science arises from the Greek: Therapeytikè (the art of assistance) and its use as an ecological hy-pothesis seems at first a little forced. But the ecosystem services that natural processes provide and offer to humans are not only restricted to air, water ...
Islands and mainland coastal ranges are fragile systems rich in biological endemisms and ecologic... more Islands and mainland coastal ranges are fragile systems rich in biological endemisms and ecological peculiarities. In these environments, the cultural heritage that represents an important component of the overall ecological complexity is under attack from human pressures (urban sprawl, logistics, fish farming and mass tourism). Among the most valuable resources pertaining to these environments, the overall emerging sounds (the soundscape) play a relevant role with respect to the maintenance of the sense of a place and its cultural value. The study of the soundscape requires an epistemology based mainly on the cognitive landscape perspective, and within this theoretical framework, the General Theory of Resources, the Eco-field hypothesis and the soundtope model are also important components. Among the methods used in soundscape ecology, the analysis of the frequency bins of the acoustic spectrogram can provide proxies for understanding and interpreting acoustic patterns and processes in action across a landscape. The description of a case-study from a Tyrrhenian coastal system of Northern Italy, via the use of dedicated software and metrics, briefly illustrates the potential of soundscape ecology, which is entirely suitable for achieving a better understanding of the dynamics of island and mainland coastal systems.
NATO Science for Peace and Security Series C: Environmental Security, 2011
Warfare represents not only tragedies for societies and casualties and suffering for people, but ... more Warfare represents not only tragedies for societies and casualties and suffering for people, but also a great menace to environmental health and most living organisms. In a short time, warfare mobilizes a massive amount of energy, matter and information without a ...
In complete agreement with the thoughts of Kuhn (1962), scientific research simi-larly to other h... more In complete agreement with the thoughts of Kuhn (1962), scientific research simi-larly to other human activities provides a service that is intimately associated with time, place, and culture. In other words, scientific research intercepts the needs of human society and tries to ...
ABSTRACT The Red-billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea) is an invasive species which has recently bee... more ABSTRACT The Red-billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea) is an invasive species which has recently been found to be locally abundant in eastern Liguria (Italy). The song production of this bird was recorded over the course of an entire year (2011) and evaluated using both aural information and applying innovative automatic processing metrics. Our findings revealed that the Red-billed Leiothrix has loud vocalizations that are heard for most of the year, including in July and August when other birds are silent. Its song production has been estimated to amount to 37% of the sounds uttered by the entire bird community. The next most vocal species are the European Robin (36%), the Common Blackbird (18%), the Subalpine Warbler (5%) and the Sardinian Warbler (1%). The Red-billed Leiothrix can be seen as a new acoustically dominant species and, consequently, a potential modifier of the soundscape patterns of the indigenous bird community. The modification of acoustic traits in the repertoire of both indigenous species and the Red-billed Leiothrix is to be expected according to a co-evolution hypothesis.
ABSTRACT Capturing information means for every organism acquiring knowledge about the living and ... more ABSTRACT Capturing information means for every organism acquiring knowledge about the living and not living objects that exist in its surroundings. In this way, the “historical” concept of Umwelt, as a subjective surrounding has been recently integrated in the theory of landscape ecology where a landscape is not only a geographical entity but also a cognitive medium. The landscape may be considered a semiotic context used by the organisms to locate resources heterogeneously distributed in space and time. In particular, inside a landscape there are different eco-fields defined as spatial arrangements of objects carrier of meaning that organisms utilize to track resources. Along this epistemic path the sonic component of the landscape is an important carrier of information commonly used by the majority of animal species to managing many vital functions. In particular birds, which are animals with a complex system of acoustic communication, seem to organize acoustic centers for public information. These sonic patterns (soundtopes) are characterized by a great variability in space and time and function like a special eco-field that allows species to share information about the status of resources and the dynamics of populations. The availability of such public information avoids a deeper and more expensive exploration of the environment to assess its quality.
Human intrusion is growing at an exponential rate modifying structure and functions of many ecosy... more Human intrusion is growing at an exponential rate modifying structure and functions of many ecosystems (loss or reduction of habitats for species, loss of biodiversity) and reducing the ecosystem services. Many modifications are not immediately visible creating an ecological debt ...
ABSTRACT Acoustic codes assure the intra and interspecific communication of vocal animals. They a... more ABSTRACT Acoustic codes assure the intra and interspecific communication of vocal animals. They are composed by a sequence of nominal entities (syllables, words and sentences) and by magnitude modulation confirming in such a way contemporarily a behavioural and ecological nature. The acoustic codes find evidence in the acoustic niche hypothesis by which species in order to reduce interspecific competition (acoustic overlap) occupy a restricted portion of the available frequencies modulating very precise acoustic cues (codes). Their evolution, like other aspect of biology, is under control of the environmental conditions assuming the more favourable configurations. These nominal entities respond also to the amount of energy by which are emitted allowing to the eavesdropping individuals to range the distance at which a potential competitor is broadcasting a signal. Environmental alterations, especially if of anthropogenic origin, can produce severe consequence of the acoustic codes that in turn may affect the prey-predator balance and the complexity of communities. In fact acoustic codes under an environmental constraint like human noise intrusion can be modified in order to reduce a masking effect, demonstrating their phenological plasticity. The new ecological discipline of soundscape ecology offers the possibility to investigate the nature and the evolution of the acoustic codes in different environmental conditions.
In the second chapter, I distinguished at least three possible approaches to under-standing the l... more In the second chapter, I distinguished at least three possible approaches to under-standing the landscape: the Individual-Based Perceptional Landscape (IBPL), the Individual-Based Cognitive Landscape (IBCL), and the Neutrality-Based Landscape (NBL). These three different ...
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selected places in Sequoia National Park CA, to
quantify and assess the diurnal and seasonal character
of the park’s soundscape. The recording sites were
selected to represent a combination of elevation and
vegetation diversity. Hour-long sound recordings
were made by four individuals at each place during
fall, spring, summer and winter at dawn, midday,
dusk, and midnight with identical recording instrumentation.
The recordings of the soundscape were
made in an old growth forest (Crescent Meadow), in a
foothill oak savanna (Sycamore Spring), in an upland
savanna chaparral (Shepherd Saddle) and in a foothill
riparian location adjacent to the Kiawah River
(Buckeye Flat). Sound recordings were analyzed
using a normalized Power Spectral Density (PSD)
algorithm and partitioned into 1 kHz intervals based
on 12 subsamples from each of the 64 h-long sound
recordings. Biological signals (biophony) were based
on the highest PSD value within the range of
2–8 kHz. A multilevel analysis (MLA) was used to
examine temporal patterns of biophony at four
locations in Sequoia National Park. Unsupervised
Landsat Thematic Mapper Satellite Imagery identified
25 vegetation regimes in Sequoia National Park.
Satellite signatures of the habitat where recordings
were made were extracted from the imagery to scale
to the region.
selected places in Sequoia National Park CA, to
quantify and assess the diurnal and seasonal character
of the park’s soundscape. The recording sites were
selected to represent a combination of elevation and
vegetation diversity. Hour-long sound recordings
were made by four individuals at each place during
fall, spring, summer and winter at dawn, midday,
dusk, and midnight with identical recording instrumentation.
The recordings of the soundscape were
made in an old growth forest (Crescent Meadow), in a
foothill oak savanna (Sycamore Spring), in an upland
savanna chaparral (Shepherd Saddle) and in a foothill
riparian location adjacent to the Kiawah River
(Buckeye Flat). Sound recordings were analyzed
using a normalized Power Spectral Density (PSD)
algorithm and partitioned into 1 kHz intervals based
on 12 subsamples from each of the 64 h-long sound
recordings. Biological signals (biophony) were based
on the highest PSD value within the range of
2–8 kHz. A multilevel analysis (MLA) was used to
examine temporal patterns of biophony at four
locations in Sequoia National Park. Unsupervised
Landsat Thematic Mapper Satellite Imagery identified
25 vegetation regimes in Sequoia National Park.
Satellite signatures of the habitat where recordings
were made were extracted from the imagery to scale
to the region.