topic: Bioacoustics

topic: Bioacoustics

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Bioacoustics and AI help scientists listen in on elusive Australian cockatoos
- Researchers in Australia have deployed acoustic recorders and artificial intelligence to study, monitor and protect eastern pink cockatoos (Lophochroa leadbeateri leadbeateri).
- The technology led scientists at the Queensland University of Technology to a previously unknown breeding hollow of the birds.
- Pink cockatoos, with eastern and western subspecies, are endemic to Australia and hard to monitor because they live in remote arid and semiarid ecosystems.
- With the research, scientists say they hope to understand more about where the birds live and how they react to changes in rainfall and temperature.

The potential for tracking wildlife health & disease via bioacoustics is great (commentary)
- Bioacoustics is the passive, non-invasive recording of sounds emitted by a wide range of animals.
- Analysis of this information reveals the presence and behavior of wildlife, and can also be valuable indicator of animal health, which can then be used in ecosystem monitoring.
- “As disease prevalence skyrockets in wildlife, we are desperately in need of tools to remotely monitor ecosystem health,” a new op-ed argues.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.

Sound recordings and AI tell us if forests are recovering, new study from Ecuador shows
- Acoustic monitoring and AI tools were used to track biodiversity recovery in plots of tropical Chocó forest in northwestern Ecuador.
- The study found that species returned to regenerating forests in as little as 25 years, indicating positive progress in forest recovery.
- Acoustic monitoring and AI-based methods proved to be powerful and cost-effective techniques for assessing biodiversity levels in restored forests, including insects and animals that don’t vocalize.
- The authors hope these methods make biodiversity monitoring more transparent, accountable, and accessible to support land managers and market-based conservation mechanisms that rely on forest restoration, such as payments for ecosystem services.

With fewer birds seen on farms, scientists try listening for them
- Scientists in the U.S. Midwest have piloted a methodology that combines satellite imagery and audio data to study and monitor birds in croplands.
- While remote-sensing technology helped researchers understand the attributes of the habitat, bioacoustic data aided them in identifying the birds that live there.
- Biodiversity monitoring on working lands often doesn’t get a lot of attention due to the logistical hurdles involved in accessing these often privately owned areas.
- The methods used by the scientists involved engaging with farmers and landowners to put up audio recorders in an effort to be more collaborative.

Sounds of the soil: A new tool for conservation?
- Researchers are discovering that listening to the soil can be a way to understand biodiversity belowground without having to overturn every bit of the land.
- Studies have shown that soils of restored forest areas have both more complex sounds and more critters than soils of degraded sites.
- Soils of intensively managed agricultural lands, also appear to be quieter, indicating that soil sounds could be a proxy for soil health.
- Some researchers are also using sounds to identify distinct species in the soil, which could open up lots of possibilities for both pest management and wildlife conservation.

How do you study one of the world’s rarest whales?
- Researcher Dana Wright is one of a handful of scientists studying one of the world’s rarest creatures, the North Pacific right whale.
- With about 500 individuals remaining, and its eastern population that swims off the coast of North America totaling perhaps 30 individuals, it’s so rare that in a decade of research, she has yet to see a living individual of the population, though her colleagues have.
- How does one study a creature that’s so hard to document? With tools like bioacoustics, for example, and Wright has listened to tens of thousands of hours of recordings to aid the conservation of these endangered animals.
- The team continues to develop new approaches to solving the mystery of these whales’ migratory patterns and biology with a goal of identifying — and then protecting — the location of their winter calving grounds.

The more degraded a forest, the quieter its wildlife, new study shows
- Tropical forest researchers are increasingly using bioacoustics to record and analyze ecosystem soundscapes, the sounds that animals make, which in turn can be used as a proxy for forest health.
- Researchers studying soundscapes in logged rainforests in Indonesian Borneo have tested a novel approach that could provide a reliable and low-cost way for conservation agencies and communities to monitor tropical forest health.
- Their new method, which partitions animal groups into broad acoustic frequency classes, offers a stop-gap method for measuring acoustic activity that could be used in the short-term until more detailed artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology is developed.
- During their study, they found that animal sounds diminished and became asynchronous in forests disturbed by selective logging, factors that could be used as proxies for disturbed habitats.

Bioacoustics in your backyard: Q&A with conservation technologist Topher White
- Delta, a new eco-device, allows people to record the sounds of wildlife that live in and visit their backyards.
- Developed by conservation technologist Topher White, Delta combines the tools of bioacoustics and artificial intelligence.
- Delta is part of White’s larger mission to document the drastically changing state of global biodiversity.

To save Hainan gibbons, Earth’s rarest primate, experts roll out the big tech
- As scientists and the Chinese government ramp up efforts to protect the critically endangered Hainan gibbon, technology is playing an important part in helping track and monitor the species better.
- In recent years, bioacoustics, infrared technology and machine learning are among the tools that have been used to make data collection and analysis easier in the study of Hainan gibbons.
- According to estimates, there are only 35 or 36 individuals of the species left, limited to Bawangling National Nature Reserve in China’s Hainan province.

Podcast: A bittersweet bioacoustics bonanza
- After six years and 150+ episodes, podcast host Mike Gaworecki is putting his microphone down. The show will go on, but will miss his expertise and command of conservation science’s myriad facets.
- One of his favorite topics to cover on the show over the years has been bioacoustics, the use of acoustic recording technology to study the behavior, distribution, and abundance of wildlife.
- For his final episode hosting the Mongabay Newscast, Mike shares an array of his favorite bioacoustics interviews that illustrate the breadth and potential of this powerful conservation technology.
- Over half a million downloads later, listen to his bittersweet farewell thoughts, and the range of recordings–from forest elephants to the Big Apple’s resident dolphins–he shares, here on this page, or find the Mongabay Newscast via your favorite podcast provider.

Podcast: Escape into nature’s soundscapes
- Mongabay’s podcast explores the growing field of bioacoustics often, and an important subset of this discipline is soundscape recording.
- Healthy ecosystems are often noisy places: from reefs to grasslands and forests, these are sonically rich ecosystems, thanks to all the species present.
- Sound recordist George Vlad travels widely and on this special episode he plays soundscape recordings from Brazil’s Javari Valley and a rainforest clearing in the Congo Basin, and describes how they were captured.
- Recording soundscapes of such places is one way to ensure we don’t forget what a full array of birds, bats, bugs, and more sounds like, despite the biodiversity crisis.

To save the Amazon, scientists are listening to its rich sounds
- An unprecedented study is analyzing biodiversity by listening to nearly 16,000 minutes of recordings made in Carajás National Forest, a protected region in the Brazilian Amazon.
- Some 230 bird species have already been recognized in 7,000 minutes of recordings, in particular the white bellbird (Procnias albus) and the screaming piha (Lipaugus vociferans), the world’s two loudest birds; the next phase of the study will focus on identification of the mammals in the region.
- The study has found that the sound samples from 14 distinct locations are similar, and that the rainforest doesn’t ever sleep, with many animals vocalizing at night.
- The rainforest’s soundscape reveals information about its biodiversity, the ecosystem services it provides, and makes it possible to evaluate conservation and climate change mitigation measures.

Scientists develop AI that can listen to the pulse of a reef being restored
- Scientists have developed a machine-learning algorithm that can distinguish healthy coral reefs from less healthy ones by the soundscape in the ecosystem.
- Previous studies had established that the sounds of life in a successfully recovered reef are similar to those from a healthy reef, but parsing all the acoustic data was slow and labor-intensive.
- The new algorithm has been hailed as “an important milestone” for efficiently processing acoustic data to answer the basic question of how to determine the progress of a reef restoration program.
- Researchers say follow-up work is still needed, including to check whether the algorithm, tested in the Pacific Coral Triangle, also works in reefs in other parts of the world.

Hear that? Bioacoustics is having its moment, but the technology still needs tuning
- The use of audio to study, monitor, detect and conserve species has gained popularity in recent years.
- Passive acoustic monitoring has been found to be more efficient than traditional camera traps; however, the use of audio can be data-heavy and laborious to pore through.
- Technological developments such as artificial intelligence have made audio analysis easier, but conservationists say gaps still exist.

Podcast: New whale calls and dolphin behaviors discovered with bioacoustics
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we take a look at two stories that show how bioacoustics research is helping us better understand the lives of marine mammals — and we take a listen to some of the recordings informing that research.
- Our first guest is Erin Ross-Marsh, the lead researcher behind a study of humpback whales at the Vema Seamount in the South Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Africa. Ross-Marsh tells us about the study’s finding that these humpbacks were making gunshot calls, a type of non-song call that was previously unknown in these particular whales, and plays some humpback songs, non-song calls, and gunshot calls for us to listen to.
- We also speak today with Sarah Trabue, a research assistant with the Wildlife Conservation Society who is the lead author of a recently published paper detailing the findings of a bioacoustic study of bottlenose dolphins in and around New York Harbor. Trabue tells us what the study reveals about dolphin behavior in the highly trafficked waters around New York City and plays for us some of the dolphin vocalizations recorded as part of the study.

Repeated fires are silencing the Amazon, says new acoustic monitoring study
- Researchers recorded thousands of hours of sounds in areas that had been logged, burned once and burned multiple times along the “arc of deforestation” in the Brazilian Amazon.
- In the forests with repeated fires, animal communication networks were quieter, with less diversity of sound than in logged forests or forests burned only once. This type of acoustic monitoring can be used as a cost-effective way to check the pulse of the forest.
- The authors were surprised to find that insects, not birds, were the most obvious signal of forest degradation. Additionally, they found that amount of biomass in a forest doesn’t correlate with the level of biodiversity.
- There’s a major difference in the biodiversity of a forest after one burn versus multiple burns, one author said, so protecting forests from repeated fires is still worthwhile.

What’s popping? Humpbacks off South Africa, new acoustic study finds
- Researchers recently recorded humpback whales making popping sounds like a gunshot at the Vema Seamount off the coast of South Africa.
- It’s not currently known why humpbacks make these sounds, but researchers suspect it has to do with mating or feeding.
- The Vema Seamount is an important feeding ground for humpbacks and other species, leading experts to call for the region to be protected.

Podcast: Afield at last, researchers head out for a new season
- On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we check in with a couple field researchers to find out what they’ll be working on during the upcoming season.
- For many, it’s the first field season after a rather long hiatus due to the COVID pandemic.
- Meredith Palmer’s field work involves developing new prototypes for wildlife monitoring technologies like BoomBox, an open‐source device that turns camera traps into Automated Behavioral Response systems.
- We also speak with Ummat Somjee, a field researcher based out of the Smithsonian Tropical Institute in Panama who uses insects as models to understand the evolution of extreme structures in large animals, like the tusks of elephants and antelope horns.

The ocean is a cacophony of fish talk, study shows. We just can’t hear it
- Advances in evolutionary understanding have given researchers a deeper appreciation of a very sonorous underwater world.
- From finding a mate to defending their territory, fish employ a variety of innovative mechanisms to produce sounds, like vibrating their swim bladders or snapping their tendons.
- Researcher Aaron Rice says fish are much more dependent on sound for communication than we realize, given that sound production has evolved independently several times.
- The findings mean marine noise pollution presents a big potential threat to the health of marine and freshwater ecosystems.

Podcast: Hippos, manatees, and how the sounds of African wildlife aid their conservation
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we discuss two bioacoustics studies of African wildlife and listen to recordings of hippos and manatees.
- We speak with Nicolas Mathevon, a professor at the University of Saint-Etienne in France and co-author of a report published in Current Biology Magazine last month summarizing the results of a study that determined vocal recognition is used by hippos to manage relationships between territorial groups. Mathevon tells us about the study of vocal recognition in hippos, plays us some of the hippo calls used in the study, and tells us how the study’s findings could help improve conservation measures like translocations.
- We also speak with Clinton Factheu, a PhD Student at the University of Yaoundé 1 in Cameroon and a research assistant with the African Marine Mammal Conservation Organization. Factheu recently co-authored a study published by the The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that used passive acoustic monitoring to provide the first characterization of African manatee vocalizations. Factheu tells us about the research, explains why bioacoustic monitoring is one of the best ways to study a freshwater/marine mammal like the manatee, and plays a number of manatee calls for us.

Bioacoustics researcher wins top award for positive impact toward solving global challenges
- An award that recognizes scientists whose research makes a positive impact on society by addressing global challenges has been given to Zuzana Burivalova.
- The principal investigator for the Sound Forest Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, much of her bioacoustics research has focused on soundscapes, which are entire sonic characteristics of ecosystems.
- Monitoring soundscapes has important conservation applications in places like tropical rainforests where Burivalova’s work is centered.

Podcast: Indigenous bioacoustics listens to the land for conservation and tradition
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we look at two stories that illustrate how bioacoustics are helping to advance Indigenous-led conservation initiatives.
- We speak with Stephanie Thorassie, executive director of the Seal River Watershed Alliance, about the effort to establish a new 12-million-acre Indigenous Protected Area in northern Manitoba.
- We also speak with Jeff Wells, Vice President of Boreal Conservation at the National Audubon Society, which has partnered with the Seal River Watershed Alliance to study the region’s importance to wildlife. Wells plays us some of the bioacoustic recordings of birds that are informing the effort to establish the Indigenous Protected Area in the Seal River Watershed.
- Our third guest is Angela Waupochick, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin and a research forester for the Menominee Tribal Enterprises. Waupochick tells us about her research project that is using bioacoustics to establish baseline data on the forest-wetlands of Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Lands in northern Wisconsin and how that data will in turn help devise long-term management plans for the forests.

Betting big on bioacoustics: Q&A with philanthropist Lisa Yang
- Lisa Yang is an investor and philanthropist who donated $24 million last month to establish the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
- Yang told Mongabay that she focused on bioacoustics due to the great potential for scaling the effectiveness of conservation efforts: “The technology can provide an effective way of assessing conservation practices.”
- Yang’s philanthropic interests extend to translational neuroscience and fostering opportunities and respect for people who’ve been historically marginalized by society, including the “neurodiverse and individuals with disabilities.”
- Yang spoke about opportunities to scale impact in conservation during a conversation with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler.

$10 million XPRIZE Rainforest contest announces 33 qualifying teams
- Thirty-three teams spanning 16 countries from Brazil to India have qualified for the next stage of the XPRIZE Rainforest competition, the organizers announced on World Rainforest Day.
- The $10 million contest, which launched in 2019 and concludes in 2024, aims to develop scalable and affordable technologies for rainforest preservation.
- Over the next three years, competing teams will leverage existing and emerging technologies including robotics, remote sensing, data analysis and artificial intelligence to develop new biodiversity survey tools and produce real-time insights on rainforest health and value.

Podcast: It’s an ‘incredibly exciting’ time for the field of bioacoustics
- On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we look at why it’s such an “incredibly exciting” time to be involved in the field of conservation bioacoustics — and we listen to some new and favorite wildlife recordings, too.
- Our guest is Laurel Symes, assistant director of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology. Symes tells us about how a new $24 million endowment will allow the center to expand its support for bioacoustics research and technology around the world and why this field is poised to make a huge impact on conservation.
- After our conversation with her, we listen to some of the most interesting bioacoustics recordings we’ve featured on the Mongabay Newscast, including the sounds of elephants, lemurs, gibbons, right whales, humpback whales, and frogs.

Big bioacoustics boost: Cornell University program receives $24 million donation
- The field of bioacoustics has been a game changer when it comes to monitoring and discovering new things about animals and ecosystems, both on land and at sea.
- Still a relatively new discipline, one of the leading programs in the field globally was founded in the 1980s at Cornell University, which has just announced a donation of $24 million to support its bioacoustics work.
- The K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics will use the funds to accelerate its training of researchers, facilitate development of new tools and partnerships, and build a global network of people who can share bioacoustics best practices.

When a tree falls in the forest, it’s the birds that don’t make a sound, study finds
- A new study evaluated soundscape saturation in a tropical forest in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, before, during and after selective logging activities.
- It found that animal sounds promptly dropped after selective logging, but that the soundscape would recover after about a year. But two or three years after logging, soundscape saturation diminished again.
- Insects appeared to be less affected by selective logging than birds, the study found.
- Another expert not involved in the study says more realistic findings would have been obtained by recording the sounds from random locations in the forest instead of at the specific logging sites.

Male superb lyrebirds found to trick females into mating via masterful mimicry
- Male superb lyrebirds can mimic the sounds of an entire multispecies flock during courtship and mating.
- The study suggests that males use the flock mimicry to deceive females into believing there is a predator nearby and thus preventing them from breaking off courtship or leaving before copulation, thereby increasing their chances of successfully mating.
- Researchers say the elaboration of this mimetic song could be driven by male deception and sexual conflict, rather than females’ preferences for male extravagance and male-male competition, which are the most common explanations for sexual selection.

An economic case for competing in the XPRIZE Rainforest contest (commentary)
- In 2019, XPRIZE Rainforest opened its doors and challenged the world to develop new biodiversity assessment technologies by offering a $10 million prize for the best one.
- In this commentary, Jonah Wittkamper, President of the Global Governance Philanthropy Network and co-founder of NEXUS, makes an economic argument for participating in the contest.
- Wittkamper says a great deal of value could be unlocked with the ability to rapidly assess rainforest biodiversity.
- This post is a commentary and does not necessarily reflect the views of Mongabay.

Electronic ears listen to poachers in a key Central American jaguar habitat
- The international NGO Panthera has been using acoustical monitoring systems to support their anti-poaching patrols in Guatemala and Honduras since 2017.
- The acoustical recorders can pick up gunshots, conversations and wildlife sounds, and help rangers plan their patrols to be more effective in combating illegal activities.
- Panthera is particularly concerned about protecting the jaguar, which is threatened by poaching, wildlife trafficking and habitat loss in this region.

Well, hello there: Glass frogs ‘wave’ to communicate near noisy waterfalls
- A researcher discovered that an obscure species of nocturnal glass frog, Sachatamia orejuela, uses visual signaling as well as acoustical calls to communicate within their environment.
- Other frog species are known to communicate visually, although they are unrelated to S. orejuela and are found on different continents.
- A recent paper on the discovery also provides the first known description of the acoustical call of S. orejuela, endemic to Ecuador and Colombia.

Whale of a find: Scientists spot beaked whale believed to be a new species
- Scientists on board a Sea Shepherd vessel say they found a new species of beaked whale near the San Benito Islands off Mexico’s Pacific coast.
- The species differs visually and acoustically from other beaked whales species, according to the researchers.
- The team took photographs, video recordings and acoustical recordings of the species, and also performed environmental genetic sampling to help confirm the existence of a new species.
- However, other experts say that detailed descriptions of the animals’ physical features and skeletal structure are needed before a new species can be accurately identified.

Podcast: Lemur love and award-winning plant passion in Madagascar
- We’ve got recordings of indri lemurs and the architect of 11 new protected areas that aim to protect Madagascar’s rich biodiversity of plant life on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast.
- We’re joined by Jeannie Raharimampionana, a Malagasy botanist who has identified 80 priority areas for conservation of plant life in her country and has already turned 11 of those areas into officially decreed protected areas.
- We’re also joined by Valeria Torti, who uses bioacoustics to improve conservation of critically endangered indri lemurs in Madagascar’s Maromizaha forest. She plays for us a number of recordings of the primates’ songs.

Whale zone ahead: A cetacean speed trap tags ships going over the limit
- North Atlantic right whales, a critically endangered species with fewer than 366 remaining individuals, face two main threats: fishing gear entanglements and ship strikes.
- Many ships do not obey voluntary or mandatory speed restrictions in areas where North Atlantic right whales are present, raising the risk of fatal collisions.
- A new tool called Ship Speed Watch provides information on vessels that are not obeying speed restrictions.
- Conservationists say they hope it will help build awareness and strengthen regulations surrounding ship speeds.

The rhino in the room: 3D scan brings near-extinct Sumatran species to virtual life
- Technologist Corey Jaskolski created the world’s first 3D digital copy of a Sumatran rhino to help educate the world about the critically endangered species.
- There are only about 80 Sumatran rhinos remaining in Indonesia, and the biggest threat to the species is being so isolated that they can’t find others to mate with.
- Jaskolski’s 3D scanning and AI technology can also be used for other purposes in conservation, such as species identification and anti-poaching efforts.

Don’t cross this tiger mom: Close encounter in Russia’s Far East
- A researcher working for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Russia had a close encounter with an Amur tiger and her cub in the Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Reserve in mid-September.
- Amur tigers are considered to be endangered species, with fewer than 600 believed to be living in China and Russia.
- The biggest threat to Amur tigers is poaching, although conservationists say that recent changes in Russian law have made is easier to convict hunters and traffickers.

Podcast: Singing and whistling cetaceans of southern Africa revealed by bioacoustics
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we’re taking a look at two examples of how bioacoustics studies have discovered things we never knew before about marine life.
- Dr. Tess Gridley joins us to talk about the recent discovery of singing humpback whales in South Africa’s False Bay. Gridley plays us some of the recordings she and her team made documenting humpback songs in False Bay for the first time ever, and discusses the African Bioacoustics Community’s upcoming conference, which she hopes will help inspire even more bioacoustic research focused on African wildlife.
- We’re also joined by Sasha Dines, a PhD student at the University of Stellenbosch who is studying humpback dolphins. Dines’ work is focused on determining whether or not Indian Ocean humpback dolphins make signature whistle calls, which could be used to monitor the dolphins’ via passive acoustic monitoring arrays. She plays us some whistle calls of a humpback dolphin named Herme, and explains how bioacoustic monitoring could help improve not just monitoring but also conservation efforts for these endangered dolphins.

Podcast: From parks to payments, which conservation strategies work best?
- This is the 100th episode of the Mongabay Newscast! We revisit Mongabay’s groundbreaking Conservation Effectiveness reporting project in order to see what developments there have been since we did the initial reporting three years ago.
- Joining us today are Mongabay founder and CEO Rhett Butler, who tells us about the impetus for the series of reports that would become Conservation Effectiveness, what the main findings were from the project, and the new developments over the past three years that might help fill the gaps in our understanding of conservation impacts.
- We also speak with Sven Wunder, a principal scientist at the European Forest Institute in Barcelona, Spain as well as a senior associate at the Center for International Forestry Research, or CIFOR. Wunder actually spoke with me back in 2017 for the piece I wrote about PES as part of the Conservation Effectiveness series, and we’ve spoken again for this episode of the podcast so he can fill us in on the latest research into the impact of a variety of conservation strategies.

Podcast: Animals have culture, too, and for some it’s crucial to their survival and conservation
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we explore animal culture and social learning with author Carl Safina and whale researcher Hal Whitehead.
- Carl Safina examines the capacity of several animal species for social learning and transmitting knowledge across generations in his new book, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace. Safina appears on the Mongabay Newscast today to explain how sperm whales, scarlet macaws, and chimpanzees are equipped to live in the world they live in as much by what they learn from other individuals in their social groups as by their genetic inheritance.
- Hal Whitehead, a professor at Canada’s Dalhousie University, was one of the first scientists to examine the complex social lives of sperm whales and the distinctive calls known as codas that they use to establish their group and personal identities. He appears on the podcast today to play us some recordings of sperm whale codas and tell us about sperm whale culture and social learning.

Podcast: Listening to elephants to protect Central Africa’s tropical forests
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we take a look at a project that aims to preserve the rainforests of the Congo Basin in Central Africa and the biodiversity found in those forests by focusing on elephants and their calls.
- As a research analyst with the Elephant Listening Project, Ana Verahrami has completed two field seasons in the Central African Republic, where she helped collect the behavioral and acoustic data vital to the project. She joins the Mongabay Newscast to explain why forest elephants’ role as keystone species makes their survival crucial to the wellbeing of tropical forests and their other inhabitants, and to play some of the recordings informing the project’s work.
- One of the two existing African elephant species, forest elephants are native to the humid forests of West Africa and the Congo Basin. The forest habitat they rely on has also suffered steep declines in recent years, with one 2018 study concluding that at current rates of deforestation, all of the primary forest in the Congo Basin could be cleared by the end of the century. As Mongabay’s contributing editor for Africa, Terna Gyuse, tells us, the chief threats to the Congo Basin’s rainforests are human activities.

Spiny lobsters raise an undersea racket that can be heard miles away
- European spiny lobsters can create a sound that might, under the right conditions, be detectable up to 3 kilometers, nearly 2 miles, away.
- Researchers used underwater microphones to determine how loud lobsters are, and found that the larger the lobster, the louder the sound.
- Spiny lobsters were overharvested in the 1970s, and though populations have rebounded, there is still a need to monitor population levels.
- The study suggests that lobsters may be a candidate for acoustic monitoring.

Audio: Songs and sounds of Bering Sea whales and seals reveal a story of change
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we listen to recordings of marine mammals in the Arctic with Dr. Howard Rosenbaum, the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Ocean Giants Program.
- Rosenbaum co-authored a recent study that used bioacoustics to better understand how seasonal variation in sea surface temperatures and sea ice extent affect populations of five species of endemic Arctic marine mammals: bearded seals, beluga whales, bowhead whales, ribbon seals, and walrus.
- We listen to recordings of marine mammals used in the study as well as recordings of ships: Rosenbaum joins us to discuss how those ship sounds can affect Arctic wildlife and how the results of the study will help scientists track the impacts of climate change on Arctic ecosystems.

Listening to marine mammals is helping scientists understand Arctic impacts of climate change
- A 4-year bioacoustic study of marine mammals in the northern Bering Sea will help scientists track the impacts of global climate change on Arctic ecosystems.
- A team of researchers studied how seasonal variation in sea surface temperatures and sea ice extent affect populations of five species of endemic Arctic marine mammals: bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus), beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas), bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus), ribbon seals (Histriophoca fasciata), and walrus (Odobenus rosmarus).
- The researchers captured more than 33,000 individual vocalizations from whales, walruses, and seals over the course of the study, which was conducted between 2012 and 2016. They say that their findings showed consistent seasonal distribution and movement patterns for most of the studied species, supporting previous scientific and traditional knowledge about the distribution of marine mammals in the northern Bering Sea, while providing more precise data than was previously available.

Audio: The sounds of tropical katydids and how they can benefit conservation
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we speak with Laurel Symes, a biologist who is using bioacoustics to study tropical katydids in Central America. She is also assistant director of the Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University in the United States.
- Symes’ research is focused on using machine learning to detect and identify tropical katydids via the sounds they produce. Katydids are grasshopper-like insects that are important to the rainforest food web, as they eat alot of plants and are in turn eaten by alot of other species, including birds, bats, monkeys, frogs, and more.
- Symes is here today to discuss how the study of katydids might benefit tropical forest conservation efforts more broadly, how machine learning is aiding her bioacoustic work, and to plays for us some of the katydid sounds that she’s captured.

Audio: The best animal calls featured on the Mongabay Newscast in 2019
- This is our last episode of 2019, so we took a look back at the bioacoustic recordings we featured here on the Mongabay Newscast over the past year and today we will be playing some of our favorites for you.
- As regular listeners to the Mongabay Newscast already know, bioacoustics is the study of how animals use and perceive sound, and how their acoustical adaptations reflect their behaviors and their relationships with their habitats and surroundings. Bioacoustics is still a fairly young field of study, but it is currently being used to study everything from how wildlife populations respond to the impacts of climate change to how entire ecosystems are impacted by human activities.
- On today’s episode, we listen to recordings of stitchbirds in New Zealand, river dolphins in Brazil, humpback whales in the Pacific, right whales in the Atlantic, and gibbons in Indonesia.

Canaries in the coal mine? North Atlantic right whale use of key habitat changing rapidly
- A team of researchers with the Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Syracuse University recently published the results of a six-year study that focused on the North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) in Massachusetts Bay, which, together with Cape Cod Bay, comprises one of seven areas in the Gulf of Maine that the whales use during seasonal congregations.
- The team used an automated detection algorithm to determine the presence of right whale “up‐calls” in 47,000 hours of recordings made with 19 bioacoustic recording devices deployed across 4,000 square kilometers (about 1,544 square miles) of Massachusetts Bay.
- The number of whales present during the peak season increased every year of the study except for 2009-2010, “when acoustic presence was unusually low,” according to the study. But the researchers also detected an increased presence of right whales during parts of what should be their off‐season, from late summer to early fall. That could have serious implications for efforts to conserve the species.

Audio: How listening to individual gibbons can benefit conservation
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we speak with Dena Clink, a scientist studying individuality and variation within Bornean gibbon calls. She’s here to play us some of the recordings of gibbons that she’s made in the course of her research.
- We’ve heard a wide variety of bioacoustic recordings here on the Mongabay Newscast, but they’re usually used to study wildlife at the population level, or even to study whole ecosystems. It turns out that studying how calls vary from gibbon to gibbon can not only help us learn about their behaviors but also to better protect them in the wild.
- On today’s episode, Dena Clink, a post-doctoral researcher with the Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology, tells us why it’s important to study the calls of individual gibbons, how she’s going about studying individuality and variation in gibbon calls, and how that can help inform conservation strategies for the primates.

How bioacoustics can transform conservation – Wildtech event in Palo Alto
- On October 17th Mongabay is holding a WildTech discussion panel on the potential for bioacoustic monitoring to transform conservation. The event is being hosted by the Patagonia store in Palo Alto, CA.
- Panel participants include University of Wisconsin ecologist Zuzana Burivalova, Conservation Metrics CEO Matthew McKown, and Mongabay Founder Rhett A. Butler.
- Doors open at 6:30 pm for snacks, beverages, and networking. The panel discussion begins at 7:15 pm.
- Admission is free but space is limited, so please RSVP.

Audio: Humpback whales across the Pacific Ocean are singing the same song
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with Jim Darling, a marine biologist who is here to play us some recordings of remarkably similar humpback whale songs from around the world.
- Darling and colleagues found that North Pacific humpback whale songs can be incredibly similar to each other — nearly identical, in fact. That means that our view of the whales as living in distinct groups might very well be wrong. And that view dictates a lot of the conservation measures we’ve designed to protect imperiled populations of humpbacks.
- Darling joins us today to talk about his humpback research and play us some of those recordings so you can hear the similarity for yourself.

Audio: The superb lyrebird’s song, dance and incredible vocal mimicry
- On this special show, we replay one of our favorite Field Notes episodes, featuring recordings of a songbird known for its own ability to replay sounds, including elaborate vocal displays and amazing mimicry of other species’ songs and even of trees blowing in the wind.
- Male superb lyrebirds are extravagantly feathered creatures who clear patches of forest floor to prepare a stage on which they dance and sing their complex songs in order to attract a mate.
- Female superb lyrebirds also sing plus they mimic other species as well as sounds from their environment, such as the creaking of trees in the wind.
- Anastasia Dalziell discussed her study detailing findings on the vocal mimicry of male superb lyrebirds and the dances the birds use to accompany specific songs. She also discussed a previous study of hers looking at the mimetic vocal displays of female superb lyrebirds, which she said “highlights the hidden complexity of female vocalizations” in songbirds.

Audio: Listen to the first-ever recordings of right whales breaking into song
- On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with Jessica Crance, a research biologist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who recently discovered right whales singing for the first time ever.
- Gunshot calls made by right whales are exactly what their name suggests they are — loud, concussive bursts of noise. Perhaps that doesn’t sound terribly musical, but the critically endangered eastern population of North Pacific right whales appears to use gunshot calls in a repeating pattern — the first instance ever recorded of a right whale population breaking into song.
- Jessica Crance led the research team at NOAA that documented North Pacific right whales breaking into song in the Bering Sea. On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, Crance will play recordings of two different right whale song types and discuss what we know about why the critically endangered whales might be singing in the first place.

Researchers discover right whales singing for the first time ever
- Right whales — three species of large baleen whales in the genus Eubalaena — have never been known to sing. As far as scientists knew, right whale vocalizations consisted entirely of individual calls, as opposed to the repeated, patterned phrases of true whale songs.
- But according to a study published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America this month, the extremely rare eastern North Pacific right whale appears to use its gunshot calls in a repeating pattern — the first instance ever recorded of a right whale population breaking into song.
- A research team with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) analyzed 17-years’-worth of data from autonomous recorders deployed in the Bering Sea and documented four distinct right whale song types at five different locations between the years 2009 and 2017.

Tiny tracking tags help decode how echolocating bats navigate
- Although navigation in echolocating bats has been studied for a long time, questions remain on how bats differentiate among echoes from different objects.
- Researchers designed a small, lightweight tag that can capture movement and sound information in three dimensions to create a map of a bat’s sensory environment.
- The data helped researchers pinpoint the movements of bats during flight and while catching prey, as well as how echoes from various objects differ.
- One-third of bat species are threatened with extinction or lack basic ecological data, so such information can help scientists and wildlife managers understand bats’ foraging behavior and develop better measures for their conservation.

Audio: Chatty river dolphins in Brazil might help us understand evolution of marine mammal communication
- On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with Gabriel Melo-Santos, whose study of Araguaian river dolphins in Brazil has revealed that the species is much chattier than we’d previously known — and could potentially help us better understand the evolution of underwater communication in marine mammals.
- The Araguaian river dolphin was only described to science in 2014, and there’s a lot we don’t yet know about the freshwater cetacean species. It was believed that the solitary nature of the dolphins meant that they wouldn’t have much use for communication, but Gabriel Melo-Santos led a team of researchers that recorded 20 hours of vocalizations and documented 237 distinct types of sounds made by the dolphins.
- In this Field Notes segment, Melo-Santos plays some of the recordings he’s made of Araguaian river dolphins, explains how he managed to study the elusive creatures thanks to their fondness for a certain fish market in Brazil, and discusses how the study of Araguaian river dolphin vocalizations could yield insights into how their sea-faring relatives use their own calls to maintain social cohesion.

Recently discovered Brazilian river dolphin’s calls could help us understand evolution of marine mammal communication
- Until recently it was believed that the solitary nature of Araguaian dolphins meant that they wouldn’t have much use for communication. But scientists have now documented hundreds of sounds made by the dolphins — and they say that these vocalizations could help us better understand the evolution of underwater communication among marine mammals.
- Using underwater cameras and microphones to record interactions between the dolphins, researchers recorded 20 hours of vocalizations, which they classified into 13 different types of “tonal sounds” and 66 types of “pulsed calls.” In total, they identified 237 distinct types of calls.
- The most common sounds the dolphins made were “short two-component calls,” the researchers report in the study. About 35 percent of these calls were made by calves while reuniting with their mothers, which suggests that the calls are an important component of mother-calf communication.

Audio: What underwater sounds can tell us about Indian Ocean humpback dolphins
- On today’s episode, we speak with marine biologist Isha Bopardikar, an independent researcher who is using bioacoustics to study humpback dolphins off the west coast of India.
- Last month, Mongabay’s India bureau published an article with the headline “What underwater sounds tell us about marine life.” As Mongabay contributor Sejal Mehta notes in the piece, the world beneath the ocean’s surface is a noisy place, with animals sounding off for a number of purposes. Now, of course, humanity is interjecting more and more frequently, intruding on the underwater soundscape.
- As Isha Bopardikar tells Mehta in the Mongabay India piece, in order to understand how marine animals use the underwater space and how human activities affect their behavior, we need hard data. That’s where her current work off the west coast of India comes in. In this Fields Notes segment, Bopardikar plays for us some of her dolphin recordings and explains how they are informing her research.

Audio: The sounds of a rare New Zealand bird reintroduced to its native habitat
- On today’s episode, we speak with Oliver Metcalf, lead author of a recent study that used bioacoustic recordings and machine learning to track birds in New Zealand after they’d been reintroduced into the wild.
- In this Field Notes segment, Metcalf plays some of the recordings of the hihi, also known as the stitchbird, that informed his research and explains how bioacoustic monitoring can help improve reintroduction programs.

How do you assess if a reintroduced species is thriving? Listen for it
- Researchers in New Zealand combined sound data from acoustic monitoring devices with species occupancy models to assess the success of translocating an endangered New Zealand bird, the hihi, to invasive species-free locations.
- The scientists say in their paper that advances in acoustic monitoring and statistical techniques have made it possible to infer spatial and temporal changes in population dynamics without needing to track individual animals.
- As wildlife managers increasingly release animals back to their historic ranges, cost-effective, non-invasive data collection, automated pattern recognition, and analysis techniques that predict the likelihood of species occupying a given location over time could improve the success of the reintroduction process.

Eavesdrop on forest sounds to effectively monitor biodiversity, researchers say
- Recording and analyzing forest soundscapes can be an effective way of monitoring changes in animal communities in tropical forests and human presence, researchers say in a new commentary published in Science.
- Bioacoustics, which can be used to cover a vast range of animal groups over large landscapes, can also fill the gap between the bird’s-eye view of satellites and the finer focus of on-the-ground surveys, to give a clearer picture of animal population trends over large landscapes.
- Moreover, bioacoustics has the potential to be an important tool in assessing what’s working and what’s not working in conservation, such as to monitor forests maintained by companies under certification or zero-deforestation commitments.
- The researchers have called for improvements in processing and analysis of huge acoustic data sets, which at the moment are the major bottlenecks in soundscape research.

10 ways conservation tech shifted into auto in 2018
- Conservation scientists are increasingly automating their research and monitoring work, to make their analyses faster and more consistent; moreover, machine learning algorithms and neural networks constantly improve as they process additional information.
- Pattern recognition detects species by their appearance or calls; quantifies changes in vegetation from satellite images; tracks movements by fishing ships on the high seas.
- Automating even part of the analysis process, such as eliminating images with no animals, substantially reduces processing time and cost.
- Automated recognition of target objects requires a reference database: the species and objects used to create the algorithm determine the universe of species and objects the system will then be able to identify.

Audio: The best wildlife calls featured on the Mongabay Newscast in 2018
- The Mongabay Newscast featured a lot of big names in conservation and environmental science in 2018, from E.O. Wilson and Thomas Lovejoy to David Suzuki and Sylvia Earle. (We even had a rock star, Grammy-winning guitarist James Valentine of Maroon 5, on the podcast to discuss why he’s doing his part to help stop illegal logging).
- We strive to make scientific research accessible to everyone by having these luminaries of the field on the show to explain their work and share their thoughts on the latest trends. Another way we provide our listeners with an up-close look at what’s going on in the conservation science world is through our Field Notes segments, which feature recordings of wildlife calls captured by research scientists in the field.
- The growing fields of bioacoustics and soundscape ecology are shedding light on animal behavior, how wildlife react to human pressures on their habitat, and how ecosystems evolve and change over time. Here are the very best Field Notes we featured on the Mongabay Newscast in 2018 so you can dive into this exciting new method of examining the natural world and the creatures with whom we share planet Earth.

A monitoring network in the Amazon captures a flood of data
- Cameras and microphones are capturing images and sounds of the world’s largest rainforest to monitor the Amazon’s species and environmental dynamics in an unprecedented way.
- The Providence Project’s series of networked sensors is aimed at complementing remote-sensing data on forest cover change by revealing ecological interactions beneath the forest canopy.
- Capable of continuously recording, processing and transmitting information to a database in real time, this high-tech experiment involves research institutions from three countries and the skills of biologists, engineers, computer scientists and other experts.
- The monitoring system will connect to a website to disseminate the forest biodiversity data interactively, which the researchers hope will contribute to more effective biodiversity conservation strategies.

Pod-cast: New app streams whale songs for web users in real time
- Researchers have developed a web application to enable citizen scientists to listen for the sounds of a population of killer whales off North America’s northeast Pacific coast in real time.
- A network of underwater microphones will stream sounds from under the sea to citizen scientists, who can then report any unusual noises and help decode orca language.
- The researchers have found that human listeners can readily detect unusual sounds amid a stream of underwater noise, and their participation can complement machine-learning algorithms being developed.

How porpoise sounds helped researchers test acoustic devices
- A team of scientists used playbacks of recorded and artificial porpoise clicks to develop an adaptable method to assess the area in which acoustic monitoring devices can reliably detect these sounds
- Researchers need to know how far away they can expect acoustic data loggers to capture the sounds of target animals to estimate the density of those animals from the recordings.
- The cetacean data loggers could reliably detect the click signals up to nearly 200 meters (656 feet), which translated to a circular sampling area of 11 hectares (27 acres) per device.
- The data logger algorithms could correctly classify the clicks as porpoise sounds only up to 72 meters (236 feet), representing a reliable sampling areas of just 1.6 hectares (4 acres) that could be used to estimate the density of a specific species, an issue affecting researchers working with more than one echolocating species.

Audio: The superb mimicry skills of an Australian songbird
- Today we take a listen to field recordings of the superb lyrebird, an Australian songbird known for its elaborate vocal displays and mimicry of other species’ songs.
- Our guest is Anastasia Dalziell, an ornithologist who has studied the superb lyrebird extensively. Males of the species clear a patch of forest floor for their stage, and sing their complex songs — for which they often borrow the songs of other species — to attract a mate.
- But female superb lyrebirds are also known to sing songs, and to produce calls that capably mimic other species as well as sounds from their environment, such as the creaking of trees blowing in the wind.
- In this Field Notes segment, Anastasia Dalziell tells us all about why scientists think male and female lyrebirds sing their songs and imitate other species — and plays a number of lyrebird songs that she’s recorded out in the field so you can hear their mimicry for yourself.

Audio: How soundscapes are helping us better understand animal behavior and landscape ecology
- On today’s episode, we take a look at soundscape phenology and the emerging role it’s playing in the study of animal behavior and landscape ecology.
- The Mongabay Newscast previously looked at how soundscapes are being used in phenological studies when we talked about the great Sandhill crane migration on the Platte River in the US state of Nebraska. Today, we take a deeper dive into soundscape phenology with researcher Anne Axel, a landscape ecologist and professor at Marshall University in the US state of West Virginia.
- Axel tells us all about this new field of study and plays a few of the recordings that have informed her research in this Field Notes segment.

Audio: Seabird secrets revealed by bioacoustics in New Zealand
- Megan Friesen is a behavioral ecologist who is currently working with the Northern New Zealand Seabird Trust to examine the breeding behaviors of a Pacific seabird species called Buller’s shearwater.
- In this Field Notes segment, Friesen explains why bioacoustics are so important to the research she and the Northern New Zealand Seabird Trust are doing, and plays recordings of the birds from both of the islands where it breeds.
- Plus the top news and inspiration from nature’s frontline!

First record of ultrasound communication in the mysterious Sunda colugo
- Until recently, the Sunda colugo was known to only produce calls in the audible range. But scientists have now published the first-ever record of these animals producing ultrasound calls in the Penang Hill forests of Malaysia.
- Overall, the researchers recorded colugo ultrasound calls 16 times and spotted seven individuals likely associated with those calls.
- The team has yet to determine the purpose of the ultrasound calls.

Audio: Exploring humanity’s deep connection to water, plus the sounds of the Sandhill crane migration
- On today’s episode, we discuss humanity’s deep connection to water and hear sounds of one of the most ancient animal migrations on Earth, that of the Sandhill crane.
- Our first guest today is marine biologist and conservationist Wallace J. Nichols, the author of Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, In, On, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, & Better at What You Do.
- Our second guests are Ben Gottesman and Emma Brinley Buckley, researchers who are using bioacoustics to document Sandhill cranes on the Platte River in the U.S. state of Nebraska as the birds make a stopover during their annual migration. We’ll hear recordings of the cranes and other important species in this Field Notes segment.

DJ and ornithologists create wildlife music game
- Wildlife DJ Ben Mirin has teamed up with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Cornell Hip Hop Collection on a new online game that uses wildlife recordings.
- Players take sound recordings of wild creatures and transform them into loops, creating a wide variety of song clips. Players also learn about the animals and the habitats they live in.
- Mirin was also a guest on Mongabay’s podcast in 2017.

Audio: The cutting-edge technologies allowing us to monitor ecosystems like never before
- On today’s episode, we discuss the cutting-edge remote sensing technologies used to monitor ecosystems like rainforests and coral reefs. We also listen to a few ecoacoustic recordings that are used to analyze species richness in tropical forests.
- Our first guest today is Greg Asner, who leads the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) at Stanford University’s Carnegie Institution for Science. Asner invented a technique he calls “airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy” that utilizes imaging spectrometers mounted on the Carnegie Airborne Observatory airplane to produce highly detailed data on large and complex ecosystems like tropical forests.
- Our second guest is Mitch Aide, the principal investigator at the University of Puerto Rico’s Tropical Community Ecology Lab. In this Field Notes segment, Aide will play us a few of the audio recordings he’s uploaded to Arbimon as part of his recent research and will explain how these recordings are used to examine species richness in tropical forests.

Audio: Lessons from indigenous peoples about coping with climate change, plus the call of the night parrot
- Happy new year to all our listeners out there! On our first episode of 2018, we speak with the author of a book about the resilience of indigenous peoples in the face of climate change, and we’ll hear some recordings of the elusive night parrot in Australia!
- Our first guest today is Gleb Raygorodetsky, the author of The Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change, which details the author’s experiences with a number of Indigenous cultures and the ways their lives on their traditional territories are being reshaped by the impacts of global warming.
- Our second guest is Nick Leseberg, a PhD student at the University of Queensland in Australia whose work focuses solely on the night parrot, a species endemic to Australia that scientists have only recently been able to study. Just four years ago, nobody knew what a night parrot sounded like — but now Leseberg is here to play us some of the calls he’s recorded in this Field Notes segment.

‘AudioMoth’ device aims to deliver low-cost, power-efficient monitoring of remote landscapes
- UK-based researchers who have developed a low-power, open-source acoustic monitoring device say it shows promise for monitoring wildlife and illicit incursions by mankind into remote habitats.
- The researchers say that the device, which is about the size of a matchbox, can be made for as little as $43 per unit — a price-point that could be key to ensuring coverage across large landscapes, where numerous monitoring devices are required.
- The AudioMoth can be programmed to monitor wildlife populations by recording the calls of specific target species while at the same time serving as an alert system when the sounds of human exploitation, such as the blast of a shotgun or the roar of a chainsaw, are detected.

Audio: Impacts of gas drilling on wildlife in Peru and a Goldman Prize winner on mercury contamination
- On today’s episode: a look at the impacts of drilling for natural gas on birds and amphibians through bioacoustics, and a Goldman Prize winner discusses her ongoing campaign to rid mercury contamination from the environment.
- Our first guest on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast is Jessica Deichmann, a research scientist with the Center for Conservation and Sustainability at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. Deichmann led a study that used acoustic monitoring, among other methods, to examine the impacts on wildlife of a gas drilling platform in the forests of southeastern Peru.
- Next, we talk with 2009 Goldman Environmental Prize winner Yuyun Ismawati, an environmental engineer from Indonesia who currently lives in the UK. As the founder of an NGO called BaliFokus and a steering committee member of IPEN, a non-profit based in Sweden that works to improve chemicals policies and practices around the world, Ismawati has made it her life’s mission to stop the use of mercury in activities like gold mining that cause the toxin to leach into the environment and thereby threaten human health and wildlife.

Audio: Indonesian rainforests for sale and bat calls of the Amazon
- This episode of the Mongabay Newscast takes a look at the first installment of our new investigative series, “Indonesia for Sale,” and features the sounds of Amazonian bats.
- Mongabay’s Indonesia-based editor Phil Jacobson joins the Newscast to tell us all about “Indonesia for Sale” and the first piece in the series, “The palm oil fiefdom.”
- We also speak with Adrià López-Baucells, a PhD student in bat ecology who has conducted acoustic studies of bats in the central Amazon for the past several years. In this Field Notes segment, López-Baucells plays some of the recordings he used to study the effects of Amazon forest fragmentation on bat foraging behavior.

When a rhino calls in the forest, this guy hears it: Q&A with a Javan rhino researcher
- Javan rhinos are so cryptic and elusive that they are difficult to study, despite the entire species being confined to a single site.
- Camera traps are giving researchers new insights into the species’ behaviors and environmental needs.
- Steve Wilson, a doctoral student working on a dissertation about Javan rhinos, explains some of these new findings — and how novel research methods might help guide conservation strategies.

Mexico takes ‘unprecedented’ action to save vaquita
- A team of marine mammal experts have begun a search for the last vaquitas (Phocoena sinus) in a last-ditch effort to capture the remaining 30 porpoises until they’re no longer threatened by gillnets.
- VaquitaCPR seeks to house the vaquita in sea pens and includes plans for long-term care and breeding.
- Though seen as ‘risky’ and ‘bold,’ many conservation organizations agree that finding the animals before it’s too late is the only option.

Audio: Is forest certification an effective strategy? Plus acoustic ecology of the Javan rhino
- We take a closer look at the evidence for the effectiveness of forest certification schemes on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast.
- Mongabay recently kicked off a new in-depth series called “Conservation Effectiveness” that looks at the scientific literature examining how well various conservation types work, from forest certification to payments for ecosystem services and community forestry. The first installment is out now, and Zuzana Burivalova, a tropical forest ecologist at Princeton University who did the research analysis that the article was based on, is here to speak with us about what she found.
- We also speak with Steve Wilson, who is currently working on a PhD at the University of Queensland on Javan rhino ecology and conservation. This is our latest Field Notes segment, in which Wilson will play for us three different Javan rhino vocalisations and fill us in on what the rhinos use these calls for.

Audio: A rare earth mine in Madagascar triggers concerns for locals and lemurs
- Our first guest on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast is Eddie Carver, a Mongabay contributor based in Madagascar who recently wrote a report about a troubled company that is hoping to mine rare earth elements in a forest on the Ampasindava peninsula, a highly biodiverse region that is home to numerous endangered lemur species.
- Carver speaks about the risks of mining for rare earth elements, how the mine might impact wildlife like endangered lemur species found nowhere else on Earth, the complicated history of the company and its ownership of the mine, and how villagers in nearby communities have already been impacted by exploratory mining efforts.
- Our second guest is Jo Wood, an Environmental Water Project Officer in Victoria, Australia, who plays for us the calls of a number of indicator species whose presence helps her assess the success of her wetland rewetting work.

Audio: Katharine Hayhoe on how to talk about climate change: ‘Share from the heart and then the head’
- Our first guest on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast is atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a professor in the Department of Political Science and the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, who teamed up last year with her local PBS station, KTTZ, to write and produce a web series called “Global Weirding.”
- We check in with Hayhoe as she’s in the midst of shooting the second season of Global Weirding in order to get a sense of what to expect from the new episodes of the show and how Hayhoe views the overall political landscape around climate action today.
- Our second guest is Branko Hilje Rodriguez, a PhD student in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department at the University of Alberta, Canada who studies the soundscapes of different successional stages of the tropical dry forest in Costa Rica’s Santa Rosa National Park, the largest remaining remnant of tropical dry forest in Mesoamerica.
- In this Field Note segment, Hilje Rodriguez plays for us a number of the recordings he’s made in the park, allowing us to hear the sounds of the dry forest during different stages of regrowth and different seasons, as well as some of the iconic bird species that call the dry forest home.

Audio: Global megadam activism and the sounds of nature in Taiwan
- Activists from around the world attended the conference to strategize around stopping what they see as destructive hydropower projects. As Bardeen relates in her commentary, many attendees at the conference have faced harassment, intimidation, and worse for their opposition to dam projects, but they’re still standing strong in defense of free-flowing rivers.
- We also speak with Yannick Dauby, a French sound artist based in Taiwan. Since 2002, Dauby has been crafting sound art out of field recordings made throughout the small country of Taiwan and posting them on his website, Kalerne.net.
- In this Field Notes segment, Dauby plays a recording of his favorite singer, a frog named Rhacophorus moltrechti; the sounds of the marine life of the corals of Penghu, which he is documenting together with biologists; the calls bats use to echolocate (slowed down 16 times so they can be heard by human ears!); and more!
- All that plus the top news on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast!

Audio: DJ remixes the sounds of birds, lemurs, and more to inspire conservation
- Our first guest is Ben Mirin, aka DJ Ecotone, an explorer, wildlife DJ, educator, and television presenter who creates music from the sounds of nature to help inspire conservation efforts.
- In this very special Field Notes segment, Mirin discusses his craft and some of the challenges of capturing wildlife sounds in the field — including why it can be so difficult to record dolphins when all they want to do is take a bow ride on your boat.
- We also speak with Cleve Hicks, author of a children’s book called A Rhino to the Rescue: A Tale of Conservation and Adventure, not only to express his love of nature but to help raise awareness of the poaching crisis decimating Africa’s rhino population.
- All that plus the top news on this episode of the Mongabay Newscast!

Audio: The fight to save Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem
- One of the richest, most biodiverse tropical forests on the planet, Leuser is currently being targeted for expansion of oil palm plantations by a number of companies.
- Tillack explains just what makes Leuser so unique and valuable, details some of her organization’s investigations into the ongoing clearance of Leuser in violation of Indonesia’s moratorium on deforestation for new oil palm plantations, and how consumers like you and me can help decide the fate of the region.
- We also welcome to the show research ecologist Marconi Campos Cerqueira for our latest Field Notes segment. Cerqueira has recently completed a study that used bioacoustic monitoring to examine bird ranges in the mountains of Puerto Rico, and he’ll share some of his recordings with us on today’s show.

Audio: Bill Laurance on the “infrastructure tsunami” sweeping the planet
- We recently heard Bill argue that scientists need to become more comfortable with expressing uncertainty over the future of the planet and to stop “dooming and glooming” when it comes to environmental problems.
- We wanted to hear more about that, as well as to hear from Bill about the “global road map” he and his team recently released to help mitigate the environmental damage of what he calls an “infrastructure tsunami” breaking across the globe.
- We also welcome to the program Michelle LaRue, a research ecologist with the University of Minnesota’s Department of Earth Sciences. Her current work is focused on using high-resolution satellite imagery to study the population dynamics of Weddell seals in Antarctica’s Ross Sea.
- In this Field Notes segment, Michelle will also play for us some of the calls made by adult Weddell seals and their pups, which couldn’t be more different from each other and are really quite remarkable, each in their own way. But you really have to hear them to believe them.

Audio: A deep dive into the study of marine wildlife through bioacoustics
- Here at the Mongabay Newscast, we’re very interested in acoustic ecology, perhaps for obvious reasons: Acoustic ecology, sometimes known as ecoacoustics or soundscape studies, is the study of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment as mediated through bioacoustics, or the sounds that are produced by and affect living organisms.
- In order to highlight the findings of this exciting line of research, we’ve created our ongoing Field Notes segment. And in this particular Field Note, which takes up the entire episode, Leah Barclay plays for us several of the underwater recordings she’s made of humpback whales, the Great Barrier Reef, water insects, and more.
- Find all that plus the top news in this episode of the Mongabay Newscast!

Audio: Crystal Davis, director of Global Forest Watch, on conservation and Big Data
- Mongabay has partnered with Global Forest Watch (GFW) over the years, and GFW has even funded some of our coverage of global forest issues.
- Crystal Davis fills us in on how the GFW tool and dataset is being used to inform forest conservation initiatives right now, new features planned for the future, and her thoughts on the ways Big Data is changing how we approach conservation.
- We also speak with Francesca Cunninghame, the Mangrove Finch Project Leader for the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands, in our latest Field Notes segment.

Audio: Paul Simon on his new tour in support of E.O. Wilson’s Half-Earth initiative
- The 12-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter recently announced on Mongabay.com that he is embarking on a 17-date US concert tour, with all proceeds benefitting Half-Earth, an initiative of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.
- Mongabay contributor Justin Catanoso interviewed Paul Simon about his long-time friendship with E.O. Wilson and why Dr. Wilson’s Half-Earth idea inspired him to get involved in this environmental cause.
- We also feature another Field Notes segment, this time with Zuzana Burivalova, a conservation scientist at Princeton University who has recorded the soundscapes of over 100 sites in the Indonesian part of Borneo.

Audio: Meet the ‘Almost Famous Animals’ that deserve more conservation recognition
- The Almost Famous series was created in the hope that familiarity will help generate concern and action for under-appreciated species. Glenn tells us all about how species get selected for coverage and his favorite animals profiled in the series.
- We also feature another installment of our Field Notes segment on this episode of the Newscast.
- Luca Pozzi, an evolutionary primatologist at the University of Texas, San Antonio, recently helped establish a new genus of galagos, or bushbabies, found in southeastern Africa. We play some of the calls made by galagos in the wild, and Luca explains how those recordings aid in our scientific knowledge about wildlife.

Newscast #9: Joel Berger on overlooked ‘edge species’ that deserve conservation
- We’re also joined by Andrew Whitworth, a conservation and biodiversity scientist with the University of Glasgow, who shares with us some of the recordings he’s made in the field of a critically endangered bird called the Sira Curassow.
- Plus: China to close its domestic ivory markets, Cheetah population numbers crash, and more in the top news.
- Happy New Year to all of our faithful listeners!

Scientists learn to listen when it comes to assessing rainforest health
- Scientists with The Nature Conservancy are using acoustic sampling recorders to help them assess how effective local land use planning efforts are at conserving wild species.
- “You would expect the soundscape to be really full in an intact forest, with something occupying a lot of the different frequencies.”
- Two types of recorders are used to capture a range of forest sounds beyond what the human ear can hear alone.

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