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13 Eddie Game: Ecoacoustics
82 Plays2 months ago
Dr Eddie Game is the Lead Scientist & Director of Conservation for The Nature Conservancy’s Asia Pacific region. In our conversation, he discusses conservation as a collaboration with community, and his pioneering works into acoustic ecology – the study of the biology of natural soundscapes. He shares his field work in Papua New Guinea and Borneo, what a healthy jungle sounds like, and what it’s like waking up to the calls of gibbons.
Bio:
Eddie Game is the Lead Scientist & Director of Conservation for The Nature Conservancy’s Asia Pacific region, responsible for ensuring that the Conservancy remains a world leader in making science-based conservation decisions. He has had the privilege of working on conservation in over 20 countries. Eddie and his team have been enthusiastic adopters of ecoacoustics, developing partnerships that bring together cutting-edge academic research with real-world applications in countries including, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Myanmar, Australia, and Gabon. He has published more than 75 papers on aspects of conservation science and climate change, alongside his book Conservation Planning: Informed Decisions for a Healthier Planet, co-authored with Craig Groves.
Hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur.
Additional Sound Credits:
Borneo Jungle - Day by RTB45 -- https://freesound.org/s/253291/ -- License: Attribution 4.0; Gibbons-Kao Yai National Park.wav by RTB45 -- https://freesound.org/s/147958/ -- License: Attribution 4.0; bat.wav by tomschuetz -- https://freesound.org/s/635147/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 ; 210504 American Robin, dawn song close, roof, urban residential, TORONTO 5am.wav by TRP -- https://freesound.org/s/616969/ -- License: Creative Commons 0; Scpsea (Scp Xqy18) Blowing by ShangASDFGuy123 -- https://freesound.org/s/712560/ -- License: Creative Commons 0
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Transcript
Introduction to Katherine Pults and Plant Kingdom
00:00:08
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I'm Katherine Poults, and this is Plant Kingdom. I'm recording in Sydney on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and I pay respect to their elders past, present, and future. Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about the sublime in nature and environment, featuring scientists, artists, researchers, and writers. We discuss their work, stories, and reflections from the field.
Interview with Dr. Eddie Game
00:00:32
Speaker
Today's conversation is with Dr. Eddie Game.
00:00:35
Speaker
Eddie is the lead scientist and director of conservation for the Nature Conservancy's Asia Pacific region. In our conversation, Eddie discusses conservation as a collaboration with community and his pioneering works into acoustic ecology, which is the study of the biology of nature's soundscapes. He shares his field work in Papua New Guinea and Borneo and what it's like waking up to the calls of gibbons.
Conservation Efforts in Asia Pacific
00:01:01
Speaker
Here's our conversation.
00:01:12
Speaker
Well, thank you so much, Eddie. Really looking forward to chatting today. In your career, you've been lucky to work in so many different parts of the world, in rainforest, in the Antarctic, sub-antarctic marine islands, in Australia, in marine environments, terrestrial systems. And I'm looking forward to discussing some of these with you. But I guess to to start us off, can you just introduce yourself and what your role at the Nature Conservancy is?
00:01:40
Speaker
You bet, and it is lovely to chat, Catherine. Thanks for taking the time. My name is Dr. Eddie Game, and I'm the Lead Scientist and Director of Conservation for the Nature Conservancy in the Asia Pacific region, um which in the the Nature Conservancy's parlance is a big sprawling region that goes from Mongolia, sort of all the way down to New Zealand in the south and the Pacific Islands across to India and the in the west, so a vast region, but a super important one for global biodiversity. My role is to make sure that we're we're doing the most impactful
00:02:11
Speaker
things we can for the environment in those places pursue our mission with the best available science. You're quite hands-on in this role too. You're doing a lot of field work yourself. What are what are some of the major conservation or biodiversity issues that you're working on in the Asia Pacific?
00:02:32
Speaker
As you can imagine, Catherine, there's a ah huge number of pressures facing the environment. The Asia-Pacific is such a ah populous region, so much of the world's population here, and and the pressure on ecosystems is enormous. and so A lot of what we work on across the region is places we have that pressure on the ecosystem, and we're trying to find find ways to navigate that. so People can can thrive but it doesn't just come at the expense of the environment and if i can think about some of the sort of major things that cross multiple geographies working with every country we work in and sort of a unique um take on conservation unique set of issues and we have to be responsive to that but there are some general things that asia-pacific region has some really globally significant rainforest something particularly of those.
Ecosystem Challenges and Solutions
00:03:19
Speaker
like Indonesia and and Papua New Guinea and in many cases those rainforests are also people's source of wealth and so there's a lot of pressure to exploit those rainforests somehow and so we're working in both of those places on and alternatives to clearing rainforest ways that people can make a livelihood or and increase their own well-being while still keeping rainforest standing because the whole globe benefits so much from having those rain forests there not just not just because of their extraordinary biodiversity but also because of the the role they play for the global climate.
00:03:52
Speaker
Looking on, a lot of people probably don't know this, but Asia Pacific also has huge areas of grassland. It has the ah the largest temperate remaining temperate grasslands in the world in in Mongolia and China, and actually the largest sort of continuous intact savannah to tropical gluve grasslands across northern Australia. and yeah Interesting, even though they're they're very different systems in Mongolia and northern Australia, they have some things and common and and One of the common things is that they've been heavily exploited as a place to graze animals, cattle, particularly. in so You have a situation where a lot of grasslands are sort of over-exploited. That's changed the natural dynamics, changed the way that fire works in those landscapes, changed the types of plants that were there. and so we where We have a program across really large areas looking at how we can more sustainably manage grasslands
00:04:45
Speaker
and then If I think across to the the marine space, the Asia Pacific has some incredible marine habitats. Certainly, that the most biodiverse oceans on our planet are found in the Asia Pacific region in places like Eastern, Far Eastern, Indonesia, and in in coral reef areas, which makes you consider a sort of right smack bang in the middle of the Asia-Pacific, you have this big region called the Coral Triangle, which really covers some of the great coral reef ecosystems of the world. We're working a lot on overexploitation and how we manage that. There's so many people and so much pressure on those coral reefs, and coral reefs are particularly sensitive for them and there many of their fish species to overexploitation. The good news is when they manage well, they can also be really resilient. and so
00:05:29
Speaker
We're often working on how we have a combination of managing local pressures, whether it comes from fishing or extra sediment coming from coastal land clearing, and then local stewardship of those reefs to make sure that they're managed in a way that still allow people to derive benefits.
00:05:49
Speaker
As we do some, one of the kind of interesting things in the marine space that not everyone will be familiar with is something and I'm particularly excited about. In many of the areas in the world, there would have been another kind of reef, particularly in temperate areas, so slightly cooler marine areas. There were reefs made out of shellfish, oysters, and mussels, and hugely important for our ecosystems, both because of the role they play in cleaning the water, filtering the water, giving it really nice, providing nice water health and clarity, but also providing habitat for loads of animals. And so productivity of areas was really helped by them. Those shellfish reefs in many parts of the world have been completely removed and because they they were sources of food, They were navigational hazards. The limestone in them could be used for other purposes. The countries like Australia lost nearly all of its shellfish reefs, which would have run from them yeah Brisbane right the way around to to Perth, maybe even a little bit further north in both cases. and and We're beginning the slow process of of rebuilding those his lost shellfish reef habitats and also doing that in places like Hong Kong.
00:06:58
Speaker
I guess you can see how so many of the solutions kind of applied in one place might be really interesting in a different context, so there must be so much knowledge exchange between each project. Yeah, the the shellfish reefs are so interesting. I remember when I first hearing about that a few years ago, and it challenged my idea of what I thought a reef was. it it Would that be part of the the Great Southern Reef? Exactly, yeah. Oh, I love that term.
00:07:26
Speaker
Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, definitely the Great Barrier Reef for good reasons gets a huge amount of attention. But I'm i'm hopeful over time that people will start to imagine the southern shellfish reefs of Australia sort of strung together as this super important habitat. And it's fascinating, too, to you know really interesting ecosystems to dive on. And also, for it in the ah in the Australian context, right around where people are. Similar to New Zealand, we've been helping to restore muscle-based reefs in Aotearoa, New Zealand, also in you know right in places where people exist. And so that's something nice. A lot of our work tends to take place in fairly remote ecosystems, but shellfish reefs are right on people's doorstep. Yeah. And it's so interesting, too, to think about the importance of naming them and you know sharing stories of these different habitats to make them come alive. There's the really
00:08:20
Speaker
iconic ones like the Great Barrier Reef or the Borneo rainforest and then yeah being able to tell the stories about the grasslands and the the shellfish reefs that we're not as familiar with is such an important part of conserving them, isn't it?
00:08:35
Speaker
Absolutely young. The name starts to resonate. I got hope the Great Southern Reef does does take on, but we you know we've had really good success also just raising people's awareness about those lost shellfish reefs. It's like Hong Kong, for instance, a real connection to to seafood and and seafood farming and bringing that kind of nexus together where you realize that, oh, you know, actually there's ways everyone can kind of win out of re-beaming things like shellfish reefs, because not only are you um restoring this habitat, helping clean water, engaging aquaculture industries, but you're creating a resilience against a lot of coastal impacts to having those it's hard nature-based ecosystems along the coast. Yeah. and I'd like to go back to a ah different marine environment with you. and Your background is in fisheries research and marine science, is that is that right?
00:09:28
Speaker
That's right. Yeah, I started out as a marine bowler. I guess like so many kids that just love being in the ocean, that's the career that I want to do. And you had the chance where you were doing some field work or or research on kind of the, is it Herd Island, one of the sub-antarctic islands? That's right. Yeah. It's an Australian sub-antarctic territory.
00:09:49
Speaker
And what was what was that kind of experience like for you? What was really what kind of struck you about seeing that island and and the ecosystem there? oh Goodness, that's a that was right at the start of my career and it was in it in one level it an incredible adventure and really eye-opening. For those who don't know it, Herd and Macdonald Islands are Australian territories that sit sort of two-thirds of the way to Antarctica from the bottom of Australia. It takes a long time to get there and it's a wild place, in a terrible terrible weather.
00:10:23
Speaker
big seas and freezing coal but some amazing wildlife. And also it turns out some really good fishing, particularly for this this one species, Patagonian toothfish. And that's what I was down there studying, working on kind of sustainability and measurement around the Patagonian toothfish fishery. And it was it was that experience that really sort of set me on this conservation path because I've been working in fisheries quite a lot. And um you know that's where I thought if you if you're a marine biologist and you want to work in an applied sense so it's a really practical sense rather than if you are a research sense fisheries with the way to do it and then one of the tricks down there we got to do some of experimental fishing we were doing a test to see what things were like inside the marine protected area that have been established around
00:11:10
Speaker
heardde island um it was so high opening. The fish we caught were larger and more abundant and so many different species. and know We're bringing up ah sort of incredible things from the the deep there. I thought, wow, you know just outside this marine protected area, the environment is so different. We've given it such a hiding. and and This place is really, remote really hard to get to. you know It's not like anybody is going down there unless you're on a big vessel and you're commercially fishing. I just thought at that moment, if we've really um We've really sort of done some damage to to this remote part of the planet, and this marine protected area around it is doing something quite significant for these ecosystems and species that are otherwise lost. That's that's ah that's what I want to be involved in. ah Yeah, wow. It sounds really special to to see that, and I guess introduce possibilities of how things could look, how fisheries could look.
00:12:05
Speaker
and Conservation, I wanted to just kind of unpack that a little bit. It's a term we use every day. Of course, it can mean a lot of different methods or different outcomes, different kind of paradigms about how people might think about conservation. I guess for you and in your work, can you just talk a little bit about what conservation means or looks like for you?
00:12:30
Speaker
Yeah, and you're right, Catherine, that term does mean a lot of different things to different people, and I think that's a okay. for For me and for the Nature Conservancy, we really interpret conservation as as protecting the lands and waters upon which life depends, and as an organization, we've always really taken ah an ecosystem approach to that. So many cases in conservation, you'll hear about people working on particular species.
00:12:56
Speaker
Whereas we have always looked at ecosystems as the fundamental building blocks of biodiversity. So all the species we have on the planet ultimately depend on ecosystems and the diversity of ecosystems. So conservation for us really means that we want all of the natural ecosystems that should be on the planet to still be here and and still be functioning. and And these days, that really means functioning in a system that does have people as well. and There's no doubt that conservation is a really a kind of ah people-focused activity in some ways. it there There is no conservation without people. And we're also really explicit that that we're doing conservation for nature, but also for but people. Yeah. Yeah. You spoke about it too.
00:13:45
Speaker
to me before as a socio-ecological practice and that engagement with community is really fundamental in so much so much of your work. Has working with communities kind of changed what you may have thought a good conservation outcome was or or is?
00:14:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. It certainly has changed what I think are the important skills to be successful conservationists. When you go through it at university, you think, wow, if I'm really an outstanding ecologist, that'll be what I need. Yeah, everyone just needs to see what I see. Yeah, exactly. And that's not the case at all, because you're right. It is a sort of socio-ecological enterprise. And all the conservation is happening in these intertwined socio-ecological systems.
00:14:32
Speaker
One of the things that has completely evident to to me now from the years of work and I think is really embedded in the way the Nature Conservancy approaches its work is that it has to be have to be working in a way that's supportive of local communities. Local communities are the ones all around the world that that in many ways depend on ecosystems the most but are also of them, they're the ones interacting with them. And as I mentioned, in many cases, this is the main source of wealth. And so it certainly could be unethical to ask people to make a trade-off between improving their wellbeing, local communities improving their wellbeing.
00:15:10
Speaker
and conserving nature, and so that means that you're really always looking for solutions that kind of reinforce people's aspirations, and and that's where's certainly where the magic happens when you're doing something that's aligned with what local communities really want to do, and you're providing alternatives, because in in in many cases, not always, but in many cases, people are really motivated to live in a healthy environment and and keep on using environments really sustainably.
00:15:40
Speaker
Yeah. And it's always been part of your, your interest too, isn't it? You're part of your PhD was also in decision-making science, kind of about how people value or make decisions about conservation. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. I did PhD was in decision science, which it turned out getting back to my earlier point about ecology, maybe not being the critical thing. I think the decision science part of my job was my training was at least as important as any kind of ecology, because yeah, you get, you know, you work a lot on both how you can make good decision, but also why we struggle to make good decisions. What are all the common biases and cognitive challenges that people everywhere, no matter where you're from, no matter how educated you are, face when making decisions about the environment. So a lot of the way decision science translates into an applied help in the field is saying, okay,
00:16:33
Speaker
knowing that that we have these cognitive biases, knowing that there are these traps out there, how can we help guide decisions or structure decisions of providing information at the right kind of moment and to help us ah avoid some of those? And and and and incorporating you the the more you can get into a ah dialogue about what people care about, um about what their underlying values are that the better you can find workable solutions and so um often often what we we're sort of driving at when we're in conversations with not just with communities but with companies and governments too is they might say why I you i like something this way and we're trying to send a quote
00:17:21
Speaker
what is What's underlying that? what's what's the What's the real value or motivation that's it's causing you to like it that way? Because then it helps us understand what how and how other that kind of alternatives might compare to that. And I wanted to ask you about a really fascinating area that you work on. And it's a developing field that you're really involved with in your conservation work.
Acoustic Ecology in Conservation
00:17:46
Speaker
Tell us, Eddie, what what is acoustic ecology?
00:17:50
Speaker
ah Acoustic ecology is essentially listening to the sounds of nature and using those signals to tell us something about those ecosystems. What I'm particularly fascinated is how ah sound in nature can really tell us about the health of those ecosystems and the impacts, the various impacts that we're having, both good and bad on those ecosystems. I guess it it feels new, but something like scientists, they've been recording sound for decades, right? Like bird surveys, bat surveys, marine whale sound.
00:18:32
Speaker
What's kind of the history of this field? The use of sound itself is really old in ecology because, especially for species that are hard to see or survey, another way, it was a great way to work out who was there. And so particularly good applications are things like whales or cetaceans where you can drop down a um ah microphone in the water called a hydrophone.
00:18:57
Speaker
and hearing the whales, you can work out and how many whales are there, um something about their behavior because so much of their life happens out of sight. It's actually the same with bats, too. Bats fly around at night, they're hard to see. and you can you can You can catch them sometimes, but then you're really limited in what you can observe. so from For many decades, bat surveys have been done by using microphones very microphones that can capture very high frequency sounds that bats make and surveying them. so There has been um kind of a long history of people using them. for that species. And the really exciting advance that I think it has happened over the last couple of decades, maybe just the last 15 years or so, is really the the expansion of that use of sound to look at whole ecosystems. So we can not only do a lot more individual species stuff as our computing power um increases, but we can also look at kind of sound and its totality. And that's one of the things that really fascinates me. So how all the sound that happens in and in an environment We call it the soundscape. ah What information is encoded in that? The history of that as a discipline is is newer because it took advances in computing power for us to be able to process the kind of amount of information that's contained in an audio recording of the whole soundscape. and Also, I think the other thing that's important to note is
00:20:28
Speaker
The cost of the units we use to record is come down a lot so if you you went back a couple of decades it was really expensive to have a high quality piece of recording equipment you could take out in the forest or and into you into environments and so that meant that researchers tended to have a very small number of them so you really limited in that sort of studies you can do if you've only got a handful of recording units but as the the cost of that, hardware came down, people were able to go into the field with much larger numbers and that meant they were able to get a a much more extensive ecosystem picture of what's happening acoustically and then the advances in in computing were sort of mirroring that and and so we had this lovely piece of both of those things coming together enabling us to to take information from from soundscapes and that's that's been really the major focuses of our use of acoustic ecology.
00:21:21
Speaker
It makes me think a bit about environmental DNA sampling too, how that's just changed so much, how you can amplify a little bit of soil or water and then see all the different kinds of organisms that have come into contact or shed their DNA somewhere in that sample, which I guess picks up some of the more rare signals of creatures that might be harder to capture their information.
00:21:49
Speaker
Totally. And that's like a definitely a kind of and even newer frontier. I often compare it to when we really started getting a handle on satellite information. So it really was sort of only in the 90s and then the sort of early 2000s when satellite information started becoming really widely and freely available. And the the insights that we were able to get about the environment as a result of that were extraordinary. And I think acoustic ecology has become coming a bit like that, sort of a critical form of Earth observation that can be really widely applied. And you know maybe at some point itll it'll end up a bit like satellite information that's heavily aggregated and people can access large data sets and do a lot of meta analysis on them. And I guess you you've touched a a little bit on this, but what kind of information about an environment is captured by acoustics?
00:22:45
Speaker
In addition to the kind of individual species that are making a sound there, what we tend to focus on is whether you have kind of a whole collection of organisms and that they're behaving like you would expect them to behave in ah in a healthy environment. So to give you a very real example,
00:23:02
Speaker
done a lot of recording in really intact rainforest and that that gives us a sense of exactly what ah what a soundscape should sound like in a really intact rainforest and then we can use that as a baseline to compare to other cases where we might have done, we might be using that rainforest either we're we're doing some logging in and chopping things down or we're hunting or clearing parts of it, ta what sort of impact is this having and what the soundscape let's us do is gives us kind of a measure of the total impact on biodiversity, which is a really hard thing to see from from individual species counts and turns out it's much more sensitive than what is contained in individual species information because this in the soundscape you're hearing lots of insects, you're hearing birds, you're hearing amphibians, you're hearing mammals, and you're here importantly, you're hearing them all in the way that they're in nature, in the absence of the person observing it. So as a researcher or anybody who's collecting information, you go into a place like a rainforest, and your presence there changes that community, and we see that the things that they're doing are ah slightly modified. So even if you're listening or trying to observe animals now, you've already changed the environment somehow. It's so interesting. Yeah, like when we walk in the woods and hear birds calling, we think so beautiful, but really it's saying like, over here, go away. Yeah, following you. Yeah. And I wanted to ask, the it captures so much interesting behavioral information too, and kind of the
00:24:38
Speaker
circadian daily rhythm of of places. Can you talk a little bit about the dawn chorus and dusk chorus? Yeah, and then these are the moments of the day where kind of the most of the most useful and the most acoustic information is there. So um people that have got up early and been in environments who are familiar with this, but there's this this this moment um right at the start of the day called a You have both a really peak of of many animals' acoustic activity, but you also have an overlap of acoustic activity because you're still getting acoustic activity from many nocturnal or nighttime species, and you're getting acoustic activity from many of the daytime species. They overlap for this moment, and it's all as i say also a moment of sort of high activity for many species. and and That culminates with this um the dawn chorus, which in every healthy environment that we've surveyed, is by far the sort of highest peak of acoustic activity and in many ways kind of dominates the the acoustic stance. If you a line of acoustic activity throughout the day, you get this huge peak right ah at sunrise and then it goes down to something fairly quiet for for most of the day. and Then you get a similar peak, usually not quite as high, but in the evening just as that just as dusk is falling. and
00:25:57
Speaker
So when did when did bio acoustics become part of your your work? What was the first project you were able to apply or experiment with this field? ah The first project we really used bioacoustics on was actually in the rainforest of Papua New Guinea, which is probably a fairly intense place to do your first acoustic work. We also were solving a problem we had, which is we were doing a rainforest conservation work with communities in a remote mountain range in the north part of Papua New Guinea, the Edelberg mountain range, and it was really hard to survey nature there just because it was so remote. There's so many species that are ah not well characterized, that might be known to local people, but not not um not well surveyed scientifically. And and it would so it would be incredibly expensive to to get there and work there and hard to find experts. And so we were looking for ways that we could figure out if these community conservation areas that we had helped establish were actually conserving the biodiversity of those forests, because Papua New Guinea has an interesting
00:27:00
Speaker
System of community tenure where the communities have full rights over their their forests. It's their forest. They can manage them and what we had been working on was how we sort of spatially Arrange the thing the activities they do so they have one area that would be for their gardening and one area for hunting and then they would try and out a conservation area and we would support them with a range of activities in order to do that. ah But you need some evidence that it's working, especially if you want to expand that kind of strategy. And so that was where we first applied acoustics and deep in that the jungles of PNG. And can you take us there and kind of tell us a bit about what those forests of Papua New Guinea
Biodiversity in Papua New Guinea and Borneo
00:27:40
Speaker
look like? What kinds of creatures can you find there?
00:27:46
Speaker
yeah very it kind of might It is an amazing part of the world and i I do hope more people have the opportunity to visit the rainforest of Papua New Guinea but you haven't and the rainforest we were working in were on these mountains so first of all things it's really steep. It's not sort of walking across a ah big flat jungle but rather climbing peaks and going down and they're covered in such dense Forest that the you can't decide to walk sort of through it so you try to find these little paths and if you're not you don't if you're not on a path you choose to do some deviation you actually have to use a kind of machete to cut your way through but then there also sort of.
00:28:29
Speaker
Periodically, there are these beautiful mountain streams that sort of come gushing out of it. And one of the great things about when you get into kind of those those rocky mountain stream beds and the rainforest, it's sort of the first time you get a perspective, a bit of a view, because otherwise you're sort of just in this dense canopy with the ah trees around you. And like all rainforest, it's got lots and lots of dense leaf sort of decomposing leaf litter. It's one of the real features of rainforest. They're very soft to walk through in some ways because The whole floor of the rainforest is it's covered in vegetation matter. They always have a rainfor have a really distinctive kind of smell as a result of all that decomposing matter. and
00:29:08
Speaker
i you hear a lot of animals in the rainforest beds. One of the features of them, it's really hard to to see them because it's so dense and amazing. know Even if you get separated from your fieldwork partners by 10 or 15 meters, sometimes it's hard to see each other. And so mostly you're hearing animals around occasionally, you'll see these spectacular birds sort of flip through the trees. And I mean, the local community where they'll be like, oh, there's this bird of paradise or There's this pigeon or something above all the time that pointed out, it's usually gone. What does it sound like? What does a healthy jungle sound like? A healthy forest is a noisy forest. They're so loud. I think it's one of the things that just kind of almost shocks people when they when you go to a healthy forest. We're not used to environments being so naturally noisy, but not in a really healthy main forest.
00:30:02
Speaker
And especially in one of those periods that I was talking about early in the morning, gosh, it's just so much sound. There's constant noise from insects all around you. There's birds calling. I mean, in some ways it's hard to stop and hear many of the sounds because you just have so much noise. But it's quite a lovely thing too. So if you do kind of stop, you know, just start to see it not as just a bank of noise but hear all the individual pieces and you know a little trick that that I often tell people to do and it's worked really well is that if you're able to record sound sometimes it can just even be on your mobile phone and listen to it at a later time especially somewhere somewhere safe and calm when you got a pair of headphones on
00:30:46
Speaker
actually hear a lot more you know when you're in the forests for most of us it's a pretty kind of unnatural environment to be and then we're you know we're always ah a bit on guard even if we don't know it and our our eyes do a lot of sound filtering for us a lot of the the time arises saying well you know what's one of the sounds you should be paying attention to and i guess that's some of the new information that the field is giving you right One thing that I thought was so interesting too is that acoustic ecology is also driving new ecological theory, right? Like we're still trying to learn so much about the soundscape of place. And I wanted to ask you a bit about the acoustic niche hypothesis and what this is and what are kind of your thoughts on it.
00:31:37
Speaker
yeah The acoustic niche hypothesis is a lovely lovely hypothesis in some ways. It's developed by a guy called Bernie Krauss. He's one of the little pioneers of acoustic ecology as we currently think about it. In essence, it basically says the rainforest is, or any environment, a really busy acoustic space. and so um Imagine if you're in a really if you're in a really busy restaurant, it's often hard to hear each other over the conversation. and That's because all of us are speaking at roughly the same frequency. and The same thing could happen in nature where everyone's speaking at the same frequency, it's hard to communicate and hear each other. so It makes sense to separate the frequencies by which we're communicating with each other. and In nature, like you hear a really wide set of frequency bands, but typically, you know we're looking at things in our work
00:32:24
Speaker
Things that are going from 20 hertz up to 20 kilohertz, maybe a bit more, so 20,000 hertz. The higher end of that range is mostly insects. The lower end might be an amphibians and mammals and then birds. One of the reasons why we're we're good at this with where where our hearing is the best. So people, are but it's actually communicated very often at similar frequencies. And yeah, that acoustic niche hypothesis is essentially, there's all of these different acoustic niches and animals have evolved to fill them. I'm not sure there's that much support for that as our hypothesis. You know, when we test it, it tends to tend to be difficult to prove, but I think in some ways that that doesn't matter so much.
00:33:07
Speaker
Because the fo the why the way it transpires is actually somewhat similar but animals communicate it very different frequencies and they do tend to fill the frequency spectrum and yeah I suspect that's mostly because animals are morphologically different shape different you have big animals and small animals you have animals that make sound with different kinds of parts of their bodies and all of that. All of that natural diversity in the way animals are and the way that they communicate drives a lot of diversity in acoustic expression. and so Even if they haven't evolved explicitly to fill an acoustic niche, they do have a different acoustic niches. and We exploit that in our research by working out something called the
00:33:51
Speaker
sort saturation of the environment, essentially how many of those acoustic bands are filled. and We do see that in really healthy environments. You have most of those acoustic bands filled up with something, say at any moment in time in the environment, is there something calling in that frequency and communicating at that frequency. On a healthy basis, many of us most of those are filled up. and Then as we degrade environments, we start to see gaps opening up in that, so you get a lot less of the acoustic space being saturated. It's so interesting to think about
00:34:25
Speaker
the acoustic sphere is another space or medium or not a limited resource, but you don't want to all be calling at the same frequency or at the same time. It introduces such a different way to think about space in the forest and communication between everything. Yeah, and it makes it such an important form of communication actually in places like forests where animals can't visually see each other easily, or certainly not initially, they at least need to get closer to each other before they can visually see each other. Yeah. And in such a loud place like a rainforest, there must be some really piercing and loud calls that you have to develop to get through. Oh my God, yeah. And it can really, can be especially insects, especially cicadas, they can be really, be really deafening. you know
00:35:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of the nice things about looking at the whole soundscape though is because you might have a flock of particular birds that hang out near your microphone and they're making a terrible racket. But they're also at a single frequency set or mean a small number of frequencies. So well, you know, when when you're listening to the recording, you like, Oh my God, all I can hear are these parrots. But when you translate that sort of raw sound data into numbers, we essentially we turn it into a big, big spreadsheet of data and you can start to see, okay, well, you know, even though they're really noisy, they're only in this one frequency band. So you can actually hear all the other things that are behind. Yeah. And how each plot that you recorded is probably so different too. Is it, what was the kind of variation between? That's a great question because but that, that was sort of the secret to
00:36:16
Speaker
but like maybe one of the biggest insights we got when we were doing this acoustic work in a different place in in Borneo, where we were looking at exactly that. you know If we put out a lot of microphones, how different is the sound in different places? And what we were getting at there is something that's called beta diversity. So alpha diversity is essentially that the number of species that you have in any one location. And beta diversity is how different other species composition between two locations and what we learn is this in a really healthy intact forest so one that hasn't particularly one that hasn't been logged before if you put out microphones say like a
00:36:59
Speaker
ah spread of them every kilometre every microphone sounds, what it hears is incredibly different to each other. So the soundscape was rich, but also full of slightly different species. And they're all very, all very distinct. Whereas you go to a forest that's been heavily logged. And actually, in many cases, you still have a huge number of species. The sort of total soundscape still looks very high. But what you see is that each microphone hears roughly the same thing. So you're actually getting really similar species compositions in locations and that means over area you actually have fewer species because you have the same ones in each location whereas in a really you know unlogged forest you have different species in each location.
00:37:43
Speaker
And I wanted to ask you a bit more about Borneo too. I emailed you last week and got the amazing auto reply that, hi, I'm in the forest of Borneo this week with limited connectivity. And it's a ah place you go quite a bit with, with your work. Can you just tell me a bit more about bioacoustic work there and what are you, what's kind of the context for that research?
00:38:07
Speaker
yeah Fascinating. and thanks yeah Borneo is so such an important place on this planet. It's the oldest rainforest in the world and and has maybe more plant species there than anywhere else in the world. The oldest rainforest in the world? Borneo is a very old island. yeah of very um That's partly why the species did so many different species in those rainfors and <unk>ly tall trees for for tropical rainforest as well. and um So really important but also places that lost a lot of rainforest and this is going to sound in some ways always sound a bit strange coming from a conservationist but I know finding myself there working on forestry and logging a lot and one of the biggest problems facing Borneo at the moment is that the logging industry is really struggling and financially it's not particularly profitable and
00:38:58
Speaker
Superficially, that sounds like a great thing for conservation. But when you dig a little deeper, you realize it's it's not because the forestry industry um does something in Indonesia called selective harvesting. So you don't clear fell the whole forest. You just take trees here and there and does some damage to the forest and and to biodiversity, as I mentioned. But the alternative is usually clearing the forest entirely. And as forestry becomes less and less profitable, is more and more pressure to clear the forest. um And that may be legal conversion. So, you know, people, the government's saying, OK, now this this forest, we're going to turn it into oil palm. We're going to turn it into a plantation of Acacia to make paper. um Or it could be communities that just need land. You have growing populations. You have people moving around. They need places to farm.
00:39:48
Speaker
And if you don't have an active sort of forestry industry, that that forest land is sort of seen as up for grabs, if you like. Places that we work, we started to realize that the biggest loss of forests was actually just illegal encroachment on areas that were forestry concessions, say areas allocated for logging that weren't being logged. So you had the quite incredible situation where there was less forest lost on active logging concessions than there was on those that weren't being logged and so the Nature Conservancy started trying to buy inactive logging concessions and see if we can manage them for conservation so we
00:40:30
Speaker
We've taken a logging company, we've um set aside part of it for biodiversity conservation, and then we're working on sustainable, sort of improving the sustainability of logging practices on the other part of it. Never thought my career as a conservation would come around to kind of looking at the details of logging, but it that's the thing that we're finding to be perhaps the most effective forest conservation work that we've done in Asia.
00:40:58
Speaker
You spoke a bit about how loud a healthy forest is. Do wild places sound differently than they did before? Are we getting quieter in nature? and Unfortunately, and and from all of the acoustic work that we've done right across the Asia Pacific. The one sort of overarching common theme is that environment targeting quieter, which sounds strange for new people. I would say, oh, yeah, there's so much sort of human noise. And they're right. There is a lot of human noise. Some places are getting noisier in that regard. But overall,
00:41:40
Speaker
natural environment is that we are becoming quieter places and it's particularly pronounced at that dawn chorus, the great silencing of dawn across the Asia Pacific. I suspect it's true in other places as well. It's quite sad and I hope that we're able to reverse that trend to some extent because something pretty magical about that noise of nature when it's in its full orchestra in the morning.
00:42:08
Speaker
Yeah, if we lose the species, we lose that sound. It makes me think a little bit about, too, that iconic David Attenborough moment years ago when you they recorded the Lyrebird calling. Have you seen that clip before? I think so. Yeah, I think it's in South Australia, and it just starts about the complexity of its song and how it can mimic everything in the forest, and then it kind of devolves into clicking camera sounds, and then it starts making chainsaw sounds. and It was just so powerful to put you into the experience of the animals that are seeing this change too, and I guess trying to make sense of it. Yeah, that's ah that's a lovely, very clever way to share that. Amazing birds too, aren't they? I think something that's also just so interesting and powerful to think about
00:43:06
Speaker
acoustics, you know, kind of like smells, acoustics, sounds, music. It's very emotive for us and it's really powerful how different places, the sounds of them can take you back there really easily too in a really powerful way. And I wanted to ask, are there any particular sounds for you that you miss when you're traveling abroad or that really connect you to, to place?
00:43:35
Speaker
It's a lovely question. yeah There's a really iconic sound that I that i just love. And it's hearing gibbend in the morning in in the forest of Borneo. For those who have been lucky enough to wake up in the rainforest, it gibbends you waking up in the rainforest.
00:43:55
Speaker
It's a lovely moment at any time but then if you're in a nice healthy forest you hear these gibbons calling and gibbons are really vocal animals. They're actually the true ape, the smallest of these true apes and they spend most of their time in trees. They very rarely come down and they live in family groups but they call to each other and they're very distinctive. kind and you can hear it from a long way away and it's sort of a sound that really encapsulates what we're trying to achieve with keeping healthy ecosystems that have those beautiful sounds of nature still in them.
00:45:09
Speaker
That was my conversation with Dr. Eddie Game. Thank you for listening and thank you to Eddie for sharing his work. Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by me, Katherine Pult. Our music is by Carl Dider. Listen to us for every Get Your Podcast and check out our website at plantkingdom.earth.