Previous Topics
Building a citizen science platform for listening marine ecosystem health
Marine soundscapes have been considered as a proxy of marine biodiversity. Is it possible to develop a citizen science project based on marine soundscapes? We compared the quality of audio data collected by an underwater sound recorder commonly applied in academic research and a commercially available underwater video recorder. Despite the distortion of spectral features, an underwater video recorder can still capture sounds of soniferous fish and snapping shrimps. Therefore, we propose:
Deploy underwater video recorders on coral reefs or seagrass beds. Away from the recorders for a short period to reduce noise due to diving regulators and bubbles.
Share your video files via cloud storage and upload the metadata to an open repository.
We will establish an open science computation platform to identify sounds of crustaceans, soniferous fish, and anthropogenic noise.
The analysis result will be uploaded to an open repository so that everyone can explore the acoustic diversity among locations!
This is our preliminary idea. Please let us know if you have any suggestions!
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.
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.