The acoustic watchmen of the Pyrenees: a network of sensors detects the effects of climate change early through sounds

Big changes are often obvious, but subtle changes often have as much or more impact and often go unnoticed.

It occurs everywhere, also in nature.

"If a forest burns, we see it quickly, but if an ecosystem begins to change little by little, due to climate change or interactions with invasive spaces, when you detect it, it may already be irreversible," says the scientist

, who has devised an alert system to detect these subtle changes in ecosystems by analyzing the sounds of nature.

This researcher from the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology (CSIC) and his colleague, Begoña García, a plant ecologist at the same center, have established their test laboratory in one of the most beautiful and biodiversity-rich places in our geography: the Ordesa National Park and Monte Perdido.

His initiative is one of the 35 highly innovative research projects that last year received a grant from the BBVA Foundation.

Thanks to this financing of 120,000 euros,

to outline this new type of environmental monitoring and alert system that, according to it, could have environmental applications in the future that go beyond climate change.

Among them, Lahoz mentions the early detection of biological invasions, pollinating insects or eco-toxicology.

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"The goal is to use landscape acoustics, to listen to everything that happens in a place, in a habitat, not just a specific species, to detect changes in an ecosystem, even if they are subtle, in a simpler way. There are other ways to do it, for example, through the intensive monitoring of 20 different species, but that requires a lot of resources. And for about 10 years the idea that the soundscape can detect what is not seen has been postulated for about 10 years," he recounts in an interview telephone.

"We already have a first batch of sensors in Ordesa, although it is still early to obtain results. The acoustic landscapes have strong seasonal and annual fluctuations, and

, explains this researcher 47, who recently returned to Spain after spending more than two decades abroad.After studying telecommunications engineering in Zaragoza and working for Nokia for a few years in Finland, he went to England to do a PhD in Statistics, moving from the

to the study of biodiversity.

The last nine years he lived in Australia, where he worked as a research professor at the University of Melbourne, developing statistical analysis methods for biodiversity and monitoring technologies.

View of the Ordesa Valley J.

J. Lahoz

It was in Australia where the idea of ​​establishing this sensor system came to him

.

There he had already worked on species acoustics, as principal investigator of a project funded by National Geographic that develops acoustic sensors ( open

, programmable and modifiable by anyone) to acoustically search for two very rare species of parrots, the nocturnal parakeet (

), one of the world's most elusive and mysterious birds, and Coxen's Double-eyed Parrot (

) one of Australia's least known and rarest birds.

"Ordesa's pilot system focuses on the effects of climate change because

When temperature and humidity change, the corresponding changes are very strong. It is an iconic place, well known and studied for many years so it is very attractive to test our sensor system, but the methodologies we develop will be generic and someone could use it, for example, in northern Australia to detect the impact of invasive toads," he says.

And it is that, as he details, "ecosystems are connected networks, if a species is affected even if it does not produce sounds, it is likely that it will end up affecting birds, amphibians or insects that do emit them. That is, they are changes that are propagate, like the effect of a wave".

At the moment it has placed sensors in black pine forest, beech-fir forest and high mountain pastures in Ordesa.

During the winter, some places are not accessible and in spring they will put more: "They are autonomous recording units, a kind of microphones that you can leave three months outdoors recording one minute every 10 minutes. You take samples and then analyze that data "he points.

These acoustic watchmen, he adds, have been around for 15 years, and they cost about a thousand euros but

"Now we can consider using them on a scale that we couldn't afford a decade ago and our goal is to place about 90 sensors in different ecosystems, even in the water, because there are a lot of insects that make noise."

One of the sensors in OrdesaJ.

J. Lahoz

The challenge, he says, is that "a huge amount of audio is generated, the human ear can't hear a year of sounds, so the system is trained to see what is normal, and in the future, it can raise the alarm if detects an anomaly, that is, it is an early detection system. The difficult thing is to train the system, since it is the computer that listens, but we do not know what we are looking for.

Lahoz intends to also study the variations during the year, "to see the effect of traditional livestock -in summer cows and sheep go up to the national park- and we want to study the effect on biodiversity of mountain pastures and the effect of tourism in the park most visited national.

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• Environment

• Climate change