Freshwater Acoustics

Since the dawn of civilization, humans have used rivers and streams as central pieces for development. Their activities have profoundly impacted the natural dynamics of those systems, significantly affecting their biodiversity across time. Moreover, an argument can be made that this impact has increased exponentially in the last half-century, creating a constant void for the innovation of better and more efficient conservation and monitoring tools. This void has been filled by conventional visual assessments and capture and release procedures for years, but these surveying methods are highly invasive, adversely impacting ecosystem stability and habitat integrity. This raises the need for new and better non-invasive procedures for biodiversity assessments. Intending to fulfill this necessity, ecoacoustics has emerged as an efficient tool for describing environments in an array of valuable factors like ecological diversity, abundance, and biomass with the use of its distinctive soundscapes, which are defined as all the biological (biophony), anthropogenic (anthropophony), and geophysical (geophony) sounds that are acoustically produced in an ecosystem. A well-described soundscape proportionates useful biological information about environmental biodiversity using sound signals to indicate abundance and behavioral patterns.