Previous Topics
Open data and codes for exploring coral reef soundscapes
In our recent publication of "Exploring coral reef biodiversity via underwater soundscapes", we provided a web portal of the audio data used and Python codes for visualizing soundscapes of shallow-water and upper-mesophotic coral reefs. A Colab notebook was produced to help people understand how to use Soundscape Viewer in the analysis of soundscapes and explore the audio library we created. We hope our data and tools will lead more people to study underwater sounds of coral reef ecosystems!
Mini-symposium on cetacean ecology
December 2, 2020 (Wednesday)
Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica
Taiwan features a rich diversity of cetaceans. Studies on cetacean ecology are rapidly growing in recent years. This mini-symposium will review past studies on cetacean ecology in Taiwan and discuss future research directions.
Visualizing coral reef soundscapes using Soundscape Viewer and Plotly
Ever wonder how a coral reef sounds like? Ecoacoustics researchers generally use a long-term spectrogram to investigate the variation of long-duration recordings in spectral, temporal, and spatial domains. If you are interested in this technique, we have created a tutorial of using Soundscape Viewer and Plotly to visualize coral reef soundscapes.
The Ocean Biodiversity Listening Project is now supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan!
Using Soundscapes to Assess the Interactions between Soniferous Animals and Anthropogenic Activities in Coral Reefs and Seagrass Beds
Conservation of marine biodiversity is crucial for maintaining sustainable marine ecosystem services. To efficiently investigate the potential interference of anthropogenic activities on marine biodiversity, a remote-sensing network that can characterize marine biodiversity's temporal-spatial variability is necessary. The recent development of underwater technology has allowed researchers to evaluate marine ecosystem change by using autonomous audio recorders to detect underwater sounds of marine soniferous animals, geophysical events, and anthropogenic activities. Until now, the analysis of marine soundscapes remains challenging because a comprehensive audio recognition database is not available. Moreover, the analysis reliability may be lowered when an audio clip records multiple sound sources simultaneously. This study will collaborate with scientists from Japan and the Philippines to initiate Ocean Biodiversity Listening Project and collect underwater sounds from coral reefs and seagrass beds via long-term recording stations and transect line surveys. New models of audio source separation and source localization will be developed by integrating domain knowledge from bioacoustics, signal processing, and machine learning. The techniques developed in this study will enable the automatic separation of biological, environmental, and anthropogenic sounds. The acoustic diversity observed in this study will enrich the audio library of coral reefs and seagrass beds, and improve the evaluation of how marine soniferous animals vary among habitats with different levels of anthropogenic activities. This study will also characterize the marine soundscapes during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to understand changes of marine biodiversity in response to the COVID-19 induced lockdown restrictions.
An online GIS of mass stranding events of Taiwan
This interactive map is created via CARTO. We hope such an interactive map can help stakeholders and citizens understand the history of mass stranding events happened in Taiwan and the species-specific stranding hot spots. We also published a short article (in Chinese) to comment on the recent event of a group of pygmy killer whales lost their way in Kaohsiung Harbor.