news

EAR participated to a new paper making the essential link between ecoacoustics and psychoacoustics. This work, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, is the first achievement of a great collaboration with the Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs of the ENS headed by Christian Lorenzi. Led by Frédéric Apoux, the psychoacoustic experiments reveal that human listeners can discriminate soundscapes based on 2 second recordings only. This discrimination appear to be based on gross spectral but not temporal cues.

Led by Félix Michaud (congratulations!), this new paper, published in Ecological Informatics, offers a workflow to automatically label sound of interests in birdsong recordings as those found in xeno-canto dataset. The resulting labelling function based on segmentation, featurization, and clustering is available in an open-source Python package named bambird.

EAR is happy to present a new paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution ! In this publication, you’ll find all you need to know about outdoor sound propagation and detection distance of autonomous recording units in the context of passive acoustic monitoring. Enjoy !

Welcome back to Manon, a formal master student of EAR, who is starting a PhD on detectability in ecoacoustics with the challenging objective to provide efficient tools for conservation practitioners. Her PhD is co-supervised with Frederic Sèbe (ENES, Université Jean Monnet) and is funded by the french company Biophonia, thanks to a CIFRE grant.

Start of a new project in the Haut-Jura (France) with the Parc Naturel Régional du Haut-Jura and the Université Jean Monnet: monitoring of orthoptera communities to assess acoustic diversity of open areas (gentian meadows) within closed areas (spruce forest).

This publication, led by Elie Grinfeder, PhD student at the Ecole normale Supérieure and at EAR, reviews the concept of soundscape and, through a functional and source-filter approach, suggests the use of three soundscape categories: the distal soundscape (the spatial and temporal distribution of sounds in a pre-specified area, in relation
to sound propagation effects), the proximal soundscape (collection of propagated sound signals that occurs at a specific position in space) and the perceptual soundscape (individual subjective interpretation of a proximal soundscape). Congratulations to Elie!

We have just started a new project in the French Pyrenees in the Nature Reserve Py. We will monitor orthoptera communities over years to estimate the success of a restoration program in mountain open fields. Check out the project here.

Jérémy who is a post-doc at the ENES lab (Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne) is visiting us for a few weeks. Jérémy works on the automatic monitoring of ptarmigans (Lagopus) with Dr. Frédéric Sèbe.