Scientists Tune In To The ‘Voices Of The Landscape’—LISTEN
http://www.npr.org/2011/03/26/134425597/scientists-tune-in-to-the-voices-of-the-landscape
March 26, 2011
There’s nothing new about studying animal sounds; biologists have been doing that for centuries. After all, if you want to understand birds, you need to understand how they communicate.
But Bryan Pijanowski is now asking his colleagues to take a huge step back and, metaphorically speaking, listen not just to the trees, but to the forest.
“We’re trying to understand how sounds can be used as measures of ecosystem health,” says Pijanowski, who teaches in the department of forestry and natural resources at Purdue University.
He and some colleagues have written a call to action in the journal BioScience. It’s time, they say, to formalize the study of “soundscape ecology.”
Jerry Roberts
