Microphone Arrays Capture The Sudden Silence In Borneo Forests, Even When Logging Is "Selective"
A recorder is fastened to a tree, its microphone pointed downward. It captures a fusion of sound: the high-pitched buzz of cicadas, bird calls, and also the rumbling of a chainsaw cutting through wood somewhere below.
Between 2016 and 2017, a team of international scientists set up recorders in a tropical forest in East Kalimantan province, in Indonesian Borneo, to figure out what the forest sounded like before, during and after selective logging. More specifically, they were calculating “soundscape saturation,” which is the measurement of animal sound frequencies that correlates with the number of species present in the area. The researchers found that the number of animal sounds “dropped immediately” after selective logging in the immediate area.
“In a way, this is not surprising — for any animal, living in an area where selective logging happens must wreak a lot of chaos and destruction,” Zuzana Burivalova, a tropical forest ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author of a new paper on the subject, told Mongabay. “It is a very unique experience to be able to listen to the forest the day after logging stops,” she added. “Everything seems very quiet, like after a big storm passes by.”
EDIT
A year after selective logging, the soundscape saturation seemed to somewhat “recover,” according to the study. But strangely enough, it dropped again two or three years afterward. The researchers are still trying to figure out why. “[A]n initial disturbance from the logging could attract species that like gaps in the canopy,” Burivalova said. “But, after 2-3 years, the canopy may be already closed, so those initial disturbance loving species might move on, whereas the species that need mature, old forest might not yet be back. But at this point, this is only a speculation.”
EDIT
https://news.mongabay.com/2021/03/when-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest-its-the-birds-that-dont-make-a-sound-study-finds/
