Indices and ecoinformatics tools for the study of soundscape dynamics

Luis J Villanueva-Rivera, Purdue University

Abstract

The study of the new field of soundscape ecology presents several research avenues to explore. In the chapters in this dissertation, I have followed several of the technical and methodological areas of the study of soundscapes. In Chapter 1, I presented the current status of the study of soundscapes as well as an overview of the contributions made in this dissertation to the field. These contributions were framed in the definition of ecological informatics (Michener and Jones 2012). In Chapter 2, I developed a web-based system to manage audio archives. This system organizes thousands of audio files while collecting the necessary metadata. In Chapter 3, several of the concepts behind soundscapes and the science of soundscape ecology were introduced. This introduction was made in order to train ecologists that are interested in the field but have no experience in the science of acoustics or in the analysis of audio data. In Chapter 4, I tested several of the indices described in the soundscape ecology literature. These indices have been developed based on different aspects of the soundscape and may behave in different ways. Several of these indices were highly correlated, which indicated that the indices measured the same features of the soundscape using different calculations. In addition, I found that the length of the recording does not change the results obtained. This has practical implications since audio data takes a large amount of disk space per unit of time. The last chapter in this dissertation presented several general conclusions and recommendations for the further development of the field of soundscape ecology. The recommendations included dealing with the large number of soundscape indices in the literature and how to improve the technology used to study soundscapes. Several of these recommendations call for an organized effort between researchers to develop software tools, data archives and metadata formats.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Pijanowski, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Ecology

Off-Campus Purdue Users:
To access this dissertation, please log in to our
proxy server
.

Share

COinS