Soundscape Baselines

This repository contains data to accompany the manuscript "Acoustic indices reveal fundamental differences in daily phenology of tropical and temperate forest soundscapes"

Available Data

This repository contains acoustic indices calculated from approximatly one month of continuous audio data from forests around the world.
The indices power minus noise (PMN), acoustic complexity index (ACI), inverse acoustic entropy (ENT), and acoustic events (EVN) are present for all sites.
Acoustic indices were calculated using the QUT Ecoacoustics Analysis Programs (ap.qut.ecoacoustics.info).

Metadata on each study site is held in "Table1_sitedetails.csv"

Data structure

Average Day Files

Files with "avgDay" in their names have averaged together all the days and sites of each country. These data were used to generate false-color spectrogram figures showing typical soundscapes of each country. 
These files follow the naming convention "index_avgDay.csv" and have a 1-minute temporal resolution across a 24-hour period, and a 43.1 Hz frequency resolution ranging from 0.2155 kHz to 10.6888 kHz. 

Variable	Description
Time	Time of day in POSIXct format with 1-minute resolution. POSIXct is a date-time format, but this variable records only time, so the same arbitrary date is used for all values.
Frequency	Frequency in Hz
avgACI	Average Acoustic Complexity Index. Averaged across days and sites of the same country, frequency, and time.
avgENT	Average Inverse Entropy Index. Averaged across days and sites of the same country, frequency, and time.
avgEVN	Average Acoustic Events Index. Averaged across days and sites of the same country, frequency, and time.
Country	Country where the audio was recorded
Realm	Biogeographic realm according to Dinerstein et al. 2017

 

10-minute PCA File

The file "PCAinput_allIndices_allCountries_10minAvg.csv" was used for PCA analysis and differs from the average day files in that it has a 10-minute temporal resolution and separate values for each site.

Variable	Description
frequency	Frequency in Hz
Time_10min	Time rounded to the nearest 10 minutes. A period object in the format hh:mm:ss
ACI	Average Acoustic Complexity Index. Averaged across days of the same site, country, frequency, and time
ENT	Average Inverse Entropy Index. Averaged across days of the same site, country, frequency, and time
EVN	Average Acoustic Events Index. Averaged across days of the same site, country, frequency, and time
PMN	Average Power Minus Noise. Averaged across days of the same site, country, frequency, and time
Site	Site where the audio was recorded. Coordinates are in metadata.
Country	Country where the audio was recorded

 

Representative samples (audio)

Some representative examples of audio from each ecoregion have been provided. Audio samples match those visualized in Figure S3 of the supplementary materials. A single day from a single site from each ecoregion has been selected, and four audio files have been provided for each: one from dawn, one from noon, one from dusk, and one at night.

Audio files follow the naming convention "Site_yyyymmdd_hhmmss.wav", where the date and time show the start time of the recording. Each recording is 30-minutes long.

Audio files include:

• USA, Wisconsin, Site W2, 8 May 2024 (5:30am,12noon, 7pm, 11pm)
• Germany, Bavarian Forest National Park, Site D1, 6 May 2024 (5am, 12noon, 7pm, 11pm)
• Ecuador, Site E2, 1 Nov 2023 (7am, 12noon, 5pm, 9pm)
• Peru, Site P4, 18 May 2023 (6am, 12noon, 5pm, 9pm)
• Gabon, Site GAB4, 15 Oct 2022 (7am, 12noon, 6pm, 9pm)
• Sierra Leone, Site GRNP1, 20 Dec 2021 (7am, 12noon, 6pm, 11pm)
• Brunei, Site Kiudang2, 5 Jan 2024 (7am, 12noon, 6pm, 11pm)
• Singapore, Central Catchment Nature Reserve, Site CCNR, 27 June 2020 (7am, 12noon, 6pm, 11pm)