Amandine Gasc

• Doctor in Ecology
• Chargée de recherche at Institute of Research for Development

Building upon the rich legacies of bioacoustics and animal communication, soundscape ecology represents a new perspective through which ecologists can use the acoustic properties of ecosystems to understand the complex interactions of organisms, geophysical dynamics, and human activities. In this paper, we focus on the potential benefits of a sound...

Invasive species are a major concern for the maintenance of ecosystem services and biodiversity but are difficult to mitigate. Upstream solutions to prevent their impact, including their detection, are needed. Wasmannia auropunctata, an invasive ant living in vagile supercolonies, is especially hard to track and is a major threat for tropical ecosy...

New Caledonia is a Pacific island with a unique biodiversity showing an extreme microendemism. Many species distributions observed on this island are extremely restricted, localized to mountains or rivers making biodiversity evaluation and conservation a difficult task. A rapid biodiversity assessment method based on acoustics was recently proposed...

Context While remote sensing imagery is effective for quantifying land cover changes across large areas, its utility for directly assessing the response of animals to disturbance is limited. Soundscapes approaches—the recording and analysis of sounds in a landscape—could address this shortcoming. Objectives In 2011, a massive wildfire named “the H...

Aim The urgency for remote, reliable and scalable biodiversity monitoring amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems has sparked worldwide interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM), which can track life underwater and on land. However, we lack a unified methodology to report this sampling effort and a comprehensive overview of PAM coverage t...

Political responses to the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in city soundscapes around the globe.From March to October 2020, a consortium of 261 contributors from 35 countries brought togetherby the Silent Cities project built a unique soundscape recordings collection to report on local acousticchanges in urban areas. We present this collection her...

Ecoacoustics, the study of environmental sound, is a rapidly growing discipline offering ecological insights at scales ranging from individual organisms to whole ecosystems. Substantial methodological developments over the last 15 years have streamlined extraction of ecological information from audio recordings. One widely used set of methods are a...

The need for remote, reliable, and scalable monitoring of plummeting biodiversity amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems and changing climate has sparked enormous interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) over multiple disciplines and ecosystems. Even though PAM could support UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Biodiversity I...

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has emerged as a transformative tool for applied ecology, conservation and biodiversity monitoring, but its potential contribution to fundamental ecology is less often discussed, and fundamental PAM studies tend to be descriptive, rather than mechanistic. Here, we chart the most promising directions for ecologists...

Crickets (Ensifera, Grylloidea) are not commonly used as ecological indicators in con- trary to other Orthoptera (e.g., grasshoppers and katydids). However, they are sensi- tive to environmental changes and abundant in tropical regions. To evaluate whether crickets are relevant bioindicators of tropical ecosystems, we investigated cricket as- sembl...

Context There is a long-standing quest in landscape ecology for holistic biodiversity metrics accounting for multi-taxa diversity in heterogeneous habitat mosaics. Passive acoustic monitoring of biodiversity may provide integrative indices allowing to investigate how soundscapes are shaped by compositional and configurational heterogeneity of mosai...

A participatory monitoring programme of an exceptional modification of urban soundscapes during Covid-19 containment.

Soundscape ecology evaluates biodiversity and environmental disturbances by investigating the interaction among soundscape components (biological, geophysical, and human-produced sounds) using data collected with autonomous recording units. Current analyses consider the acoustic properties of frequency and amplitude resulting in varied metrics, but...

• Freshwater systems are globally threatened and in need of enhanced monitoring and assessment. We applied soundscape recording and analysis—which presents an opportunity for long‐term, high‐resolution animal community monitoring and assessment—to a freshwater context to better understand the acoustic diversity and dynamics of these systems. • We r...

Soundscape ecologists have collected sound recordings from large-scale studies that are difficult to analyze with traditional approaches and tools. Natural soundscapes are complex and contain a diverse mixture of biological, geophysical, and anthropogenic sources that span similar frequency bands and often lack a discernible fundamental frequency....

The world’s biodiversity is drastically decreasing due to human activity. The paleotropical rainforests of Borneo contribute 10% of the world biodiversity but are at risk of destruction due to logging and other human interests. SoundscapeEcology, defined as the composition of sounds in an environment, is a new field that offers potential for biodiv...

One of the major research themes of soundscape ecology is to understand ecosystem dynamics by measuring and analyzingpatterns in biological acoustic communication in the context of the local environment. The emerging field focuses at landscape scales to quantify compositional, spatial, and temporal variation in these patterns. This is reflected by...

The past decade has produced an increased ecological interest in sonic environments, or soundscapes. However, despite this rise in interest and technological improvements that allow for long-term acoustic surveys in various environments, some habitats' soundscapes remain to be explored. Ponds, and more generally freshwater habitats, are one of thes...

Few studies have assessed the relative importance of morphological, ecological and phylogenetic factors in the evolution of social behaviour.We examine the role of these factors in social evolution among blaberid cockroaches. We first analyse and compare behavioural interactions in 13 species. We then ask how the nature of these interactions relate...

Modern biogeography now encompasses an impressive diversity of patterns and phenomena of the geography of nature, providing insights fundamental to understanding the forces influencing the spatial and temporal dynamics of biological diversity. However, rather than praise our discipline for its great breadth of visions, our purpose here is to point...

Introduction New Caledonia archipelago is one of the smallest hotspot of biodiversity in the world. Unfortunately, this impressive endemic fauna and flora undergo strong pressures with great impacts. Human activities, such as mining, urbanism and unintended wildfire, with the occurrence of highly harmful invasive ant species represent major threats...

Bioacoustics is historically a discipline that essentially focuses on individual behaviour in relation to population and species evolutionary levels but rarely in connection with higher levels of ecological complexity like community, landscape or ecosystem. However, some recent bioacoustic researches have operated a change of scale by developing ac...

New Caledonia archipelago, as a biodiversity hotspot of high endemism, is highly threatened by biological invasions. Among invasives, ants are recognized as major threats for New Caledonian fauna and flora, local agriculture and population. Three main invasive ants are established in the archipelago: Wasmannia auropunctata, Pheidole megacephala and...

With only 5% of the global terrestrial area, and more than 20% of the terrestrial plant and vertebrate species in the world, islands are major components of worldwide biodiversity and receive increasingly attention to manage these areas of interest. As a threat for these hotspots of biodiversity and endemism, exotics invasive ants are considered as...

Questions Is phylogenetic diversity ( PD ) an accurate surrogate for functional diversity ( FD )? How are FD : PD correlations affected by the diversity index used, covarying factors and/or the strength of the phylogenetic signal in ecological traits? Location Field study, coastal marsh plain Mekhada, Algeria, complemented by simulated data. Meth...

Acoustic differences between the ambient noises of the three sites. The ambient noises coming from the different sites measured on files with null animal activity. A: Results of Principal Coordinate Analysis (PCoA) applied to the acoustic dissimilarities among recordings with factor “Site” as a supplementary variable subsequently projected on the m...

Acoustic differences between sites measured on a balanced sub-sample of hours. Results of Distance-based ReDundancy Analysis (dbRDA) measured on a balanced sub-sample of hours, applied to the acoustic dissimilarities among recordings, with factor “Site” as an explanatory variable (A: Aoupinié, K: Koghis, M: Mandjélia). (EPS)

Data describing the biodiversity of the three sites through 14 genera and 4 families. Since these data come from phylogenies and inventories based on different geographical sampling, specimens are not sampled in every site. The main number determines the presence or absence of the taxa on the site, whereas the number in parenthesis determines wheth...

Number and percentage of files with different activity levels for each site after the exclusion of noisy files. (DOC)

Number and percentage of files associated to different noise types and number of files after exclusion of the noisy files for each site. (DOC)

We developed an approach for analysing the effects of two crossed factors A and B on the functional, taxonomic or phylogenetic composition of communities. The methodology, known as crossed-DPCoA, defines a space where species, communities and the levels of the two factors are organised as a set of points. In this space, the Euclidean distance betwe...

Bird taxonomy. (PDF)

R scripts. R scripts are used in Text S4. (TXT)

Manual for R scripts. This appendix uses data available in Dataset S1 and R scripts available in Text S3. (PDF)

Connections between crossed-DPCoA and other ordination approaches. Previously developed crossed analyses that treat species as equidistant, as with classical diversity indices are compared with crossed-DPCoA. (PDF)

The data set in ascii format to be loaded by the R software. The data are described in Text S4. (RDA)

Notations and proofs. (PDF)

Detailed description of crossed-DPCoA, discussion and further propositions. We provide all equations necessary to obtain the space of DPCoA and to perform crossed-DPCoA. Our choices are justified and compared with other possible versions of crossed-DPCoA. The issues related to repetition and unbalanced schemes are discussed and solutions given. (PD...

Species whose positions in the phylogeny were not defined by Davis. This appendix contains details on the establishment of the phylogeny. (PDF)

Biodiversity assessment is one of the major challenges for ecology and conservation. With current increaseof biodiversity loss during the last decades, there is an urgent need to quickly estimate biodiversity levels. This study aims at testing the validity of new biodiversity indices based on an acoustic analysis of choruses produced by animal comm...

Amplification conditions modified from Bardeleben et al. (2004). We performed 10 µL PCR reactions with 1 µL template DNA, 1X GeneAmp PCR Buffer II (Applied Biosystems), 1.5 or 2.0 mM MgCl2 (see below), 0.4 mM dNTPs, 0.25 µM of each primer (forward and reverse), and 0.3 U of Taq polymerase. PCR cycles consisted of an initial denaturation step at 94°...

Invasive species can dramatically impact natural populations, especially those living on islands. Though numerous examples illustrate the ecological impact of invasive predators, no study has examined the genetic consequences for native populations subject to invasion. Here we capitalize on a natural experiment in which a long-term study of the bro...