What does a healthy rainforest sound like? Soundscapes can inform us about rainforest conservation status

Conservation and sustainable management projects need to be able to monitor their progress – or lack thereof – in a timely and rigorous way that is scalable: increasing biodiversity with forest regeneration in Indonesia should be possible to measure with the same indicator as in Myanmar. Soundscape monitoring can capture vocalizing diversity over time and across sites, and is being increasingly tested as a tool for conservation monitoring. A major obstacle towards this is the lack of knowledge of how natural and human modified soundscapes change across scales. In this talk, I will describe how soundscapes change between land use types, as well as with different intensities within land use types. I will introduce three soundscape analysis techniques, on examples of soundscapes from Myanmar, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea.