Soundscapes and Passive Acoustic Monitoring in ecological studies in Brazilian biomes
Acoustic Indices;Soundscape; Seasonally Dry Topical Forest;Acoustic Ecology;Cerrado;Atlantic Forest;Caatinga;Mata Atlântica
Soundscape studies has becoming more popular nowadays as an important tool with the potential to evaluate environmental health, changes in land use, climate change, in several temporal and spatial scales. In tropical environments, the high biodiversity associated with a restricted taxonomic knowledge for many taxa and the lack of financial resources make the acoustic ecology studies more challenging than in other regions. At the same time, tropical areas are the most important in terms of biodiversity conservation, and the use of acoustic monitoring is even more relevant once it can facilitate long-term studies at a lower cost than traditional ecological surveys. Facing a reality of rapid technological innovations and data analysis methods in the acoustic ecology field, this thesis has the main goal of evaluate the use of passive acoustic monitoring in Brazilian biomes, providing analysis protocols and contributing to advance of acoustic ecology in tropical regions. The thesis is divided in three chapters and an appendix with a science outreach text, published in the magazine “Ciência Hoje Crianças”. In the first chapter we describe patterns in use of acoustic space in a Caatinga area, looking for changes in seasonality and diel patterns of vocal animals. In the second chapter, also in a Caatinga area, we aimed to understand how a windfarm facility modifies the soundscape around it. In the third one, we used data from Caatinga, Cerrado and Atlantic Forest, to answer how the sampling effort in birds survey based on acoustic data responds to variables such as diversity and species rarity between the three biomes.