OOS 92

Ecological Acoustics: Conceptual and Technological Advances in Ecology Through Sound

The natural world is alive with sounds, and increasingly, the spatial and temporal patterns of these sounds are being used to measure fundamental ecological processes from organismal to landscape scales. Recent developments in the technology for recording , visualizing and analyzing sounds are rapidly changing our understanding of how ecosystems function. Increasingly, maps of animal acoustic occurrence or geographic spread of anthropogenic noise are being used to inform explicit conservation and management efforts. Despite the growth and development within this field, there is still not a coherent understanding of what researchers in the field are doing, and there are divisions across taxon and ecosystems. Investigators and students focusing on a particular system may not be aware of major technological or conceptual advances made in other bioacoustics areas. More challenging still is that even though the discipline of bioacoustics addresses fundamental questions in ecology, it is still not adopted as a central approach or set of concepts in ecology. This session will include speakers with expertise that spans the field of current bioacoustics research , representing a range of questions, approaches, taxa, and ecosystems all using sound as the basis for understanding ecological function. As part of this session, we will bring together both new and established individuals in the field of ecological acoustics to highlight the wide range of valuable contributions acoustics can make to the field of Ecology.