Ecoacoustics: A New Tool to Investigate the Ecological Complexity

Document Type : Review

Author

Professor / Urbino University

Abstract

The great potentiality of the ecoacoustics approach is emerging in these last decades thanks to new theories and principles and by the use of advanced digital technologies to recording sound, and by the capacity to process large amount of data at time. The contemporary awareness of the intrusion of anthropogenic sounds (technophonies) into natural and human-modified landscapes and the urgent necessity to adopt short-term predictive tools to compensate for the impact of climate change on the Earth appoint ecoacoustics as an important ecological discipline.
In the near future we expect a great contribution of the ecoacoustics, to promote ecological research on individual species, populations, communities and landscapes. Especially in marine environment the use of ecoacoutsics is really important due the difficulty to explore the submerged seascape with other devices.
Ecoacoustics, exploring the complexity of the soundscapes offers additional ecological tools to investigate and to interpret structure and dynamics of pristine and modified landscapes.

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