Jérôme Sueur

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle · Institut de Systématique, Evolution, Biodiversité

Belohina inexpectata Paulian, 1958, the only known representative of Belohinidae (Coleoptera Scarabaeoidea) and a Madagascan endemic, is re-described based on recently collected material. Some remarks are provided on its unusual morphology and in particular mouthparts, antennae and aedeagus. Data on its life history are also provided, including evi...

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...

Aquatic insects are a major indicator used to assess ecological condition in freshwater environments. However, current methods to collect and identify aquatic insects require advanced taxonomic expertise and rely on invasive techniques that lack spatio-temporal replication. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is emerging as a non-invasive complementa...

The concept of a soundscape is found in both ecology and music studies. Nature soundscapes and soundscape compositions are analyzed by both disciplines, respectively, to understand their biological diversity and ecosystem functioning and to interpret their compositional structure. A major challenge for both disciplines is visualizing the informatio...

Belohina inexpectata Paulian, the only known representative of Belohinidae (Coleoptera: Scarabaeoidea) and a Madagascan endemic, is redescribed based on recently collected material. Some remarks are provided on its unusual morphology and in particular its mouthparts, with recessed mandibles and membranous epipharynx, its antennae with a V-shaped se...

Research in hearing sciences has provided extensive knowledge about how the human auditory system processes speech and assists communication. In contrast, little is known about how this system processes "natural soundscapes," that is the complex arrangements of biological and geophysical sounds shaped by sound propagation through non-anthropogenic...

A previous modelling study reported that spectro-temporal cues perceptually relevant to humans provide enough information to accurately classify "natural soundscapes" recorded in four distinct temperate habitats of a biosphere reserve [Thoret, Varnet, Boubenec, Ferriere, Le Tourneau, Krause, and Lorenzi (2020). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 147, 3260]. The g...

Open audio databases such as Xeno-Canto are widely used to build datasets to explore bird song repertoire or to train models for automatic bird sound classification by deep learning algorithms. However, such databases suffer from the fact that bird sounds are weakly labelled: a species name is attributed to each audio recording without timestamps t...

1. Passive acoustic monitoring of biodiversity is growing fast, as it offers an alternative to traditional aural point count surveys, with the possibility to deploy long-term acoustic surveys in large and complex natural environments. However, there is still a clear need to evaluate how the frequency-and distancedependent attenuation of sound as we...

Passive acoustic monitoring of biodiversity is growing fast, as it offers an alternative to traditional aural point count surveys, with the possibility to deploy long‐term acoustic surveys in large and complex natural environments. However, there is still a clear need to evaluate how the frequency‐ and distance‐dependent attenuation of sound as wel...

The concept of soundscape was originally coined to study the relationship between humans and their sonic environment. Since then, several definitions of soundscapes have been proposed based on musical, acoustical and ecological perspectives. However, the causal mechanisms that underlie soundscapes have often been overlooked. As a consequence, the t...

The collection and interpretation of field data is a prerequisite for informed conservation in protected environments. Although several techniques, including camera trapping and passive acoustic monitoring, have been developed to estimate the presence of animal species, very few attempts have been made to monitor ecological functions. Pollination b...

Our awareness of air-borne sounds in natural and urban habitats has led to the recent recognition of soundscape ecology and ecoacoustics as interdisciplinary fields of research that can help us better understand ecological processes and ecosystem dynamics. Because the vibroscape (i.e., the substrate-borne vibrations occurring in a given environment...

Context One mainstay of soundscape ecology is to understand acoustic pattern changes, in particular the relative balance between biophony (biotic sounds), geophony (abiotic sounds), and anthropophony (human-related sounds). However, little research has been pursued to automatically track these three components. Objectives Here, we introduce a 15-y...

Jérôme Sueur and colleagues introduce the acoustic components of biodiversity.

The structure of ecological communities is thought to be mainly driven by competition processes between species. One special case of resource shaping community dynamics is the acoustic space. However, the acoustic communities have been rarely described for tropical birds. Here, we aimed at estimating acoustic competition between the iconic species...

Our experiences shape our knowledge and understanding of the world around us. The natural vibrational environment (vibroscape) is hidden to human senses, but is nevertheless perceived and exploited by the majority of animals. Here, we show that the vibroscape recorded on plants in a temperate hay meadow is a dynamic low-frequency world, rich in spe...

Passive acoustic monitoring is increasingly being applied to terrestrial, marine and freshwater environments, providing cost‐efficient methods for surveying biodiversity. However, processing the avalanche of audio recordings remains challenging, and represents nowadays a major bottleneck that slows down its application in research and conservation....

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

In tropical regions, some anuran species breed "explosively", reproducing in massive and highly diverse aggregations during a brief window of time. These aggregations can serve as acoustic beacons, attracting other anurans toward seasonal ponds. We hypothesize that conspecific and heterospecific calls play a role in navigation toward ponds and sync...

Climate change is severely altering precipitation regimes at local and global scales, yet the capacity of species to cope with these changes has been insufficiently examined. Amphibians are globally endangered and particularly sensitive to moisture conditions. For mating, most amphibian species rely on calling behaviour, which is a key weather‐depe...

It is a challenge to identify suitable structural and functional indicators to monitor and assess the effects of anthropogenic stressors on the ecological status of freshwater ecosystems. Passive acoustics could potentially be used to monitor invertebrate species and ecological processes in freshwater environments.

A major challenge in water quality assessment is to identify suitable indicators to monitor and assess the effects of anthropogenic stressors on the ecological status of freshwater ecosystems. Passive acoustic monitoring is a novel approach that could potentially be used to detect invertebrate species and ecological processes such as dissolved oxyg...

Tropical forests are facing threats that may affect the dynamics of seed dispersers which participate in the forest regeneration. To implement appropriate conservation programs, it appears necessary to monitor seed dispersers and to estimate their response to local changes. Here, we used non-invasive ecoacoustic methods to monitor the activity of a...

The Resplendent Quetzal Pharomachrus mocinno is a rare Neotropical bird included in the IUCN red list as Near Threatened. Fragmentation of its habitat, the cloud forest, is considered as the principal threat. Two subspecies are currently recognised but genetic and morphometric studies suggested they could be considered as full species. We assessed...

Vocalizations of the rare and flagship species Pharomachrus mocinno (Aves: 24 Trogonidae): implications for its taxonomy, evolution and conservation 25 26 Abstract 27 The Resplendent Quetzal Pharomachrus mocinno is a rare Neotropical bird included in the IUCN 28 red list as Near Threatened. Fragmentation of its habitat, the cloud forest, is conside...

Forests, deserts, rivers, and oceans are filled with animal vocalizations and geological sounds. We postulate that climate change is changing the Earth’s natural acoustic fabric. In particular, we identify shifts in acoustic structure that all soundsensitive organisms, marine and terrestrial, may experience. Only upstream solutions might mitigate t...

Background: Anurans largely rely on acoustic communication for sexual selection and reproduction. While multiple studies have focused on the calling activity patterns of prolonged breeding assemblages, species that concentrate their reproduction in short-time windows, explosive breeders, are still largely unknown, probably because of their ephemer...

Biodiversity in freshwater habitats is decreasing faster than in any other environment, mostly due to human activities. Monitoring these losses can help guide mitigation efforts. In most comparative or focal studies, sampling strategies predominantly rely on collecting animal and vegetal specimens. Although these techniques have produced valuable d...

Ecoacoustic research mainly relies on signal and data analysis. Beyond manual inspection, the current solutions to decipher the content of population, community or soundscape recordings either refer to supervised classification methods that need labelled data (e.g. SVM, CNN, RF) or to global diversity indices that totally avoid species identificati...

Recent studies revealed that information on ecological patterns and processes can be investigated using sounds emanating from animal communities. In freshwater environments, animal communities are strongly shaped by key ecological factors such as lateral connectivity and temperature. We predict that those ecological factors are linked to acoustic c...

Adapting a definition of soundscape, vibroscape is composed from substrate-borne vibrations originating from biological, geophysical and antropogenic sources present in the environment. Anthropogenic vibrations are produced by human activity, while geophysical vibrations result from natural abiotic sources. Biological vibrations result from activit...

• Acoustic population monitoring is a noninvasive method that can be deployed continuously over long periods of time and at large spatial scales. One of the newly discovered threats acting on biological diversity is anthropogenic noise. High levels of anthropogenic noise occur in aquatic environments, yet their effects on animals living in freshwat...

Sound is almost always around us, anywhere, at any time, reaching our ears and stimulating our brains for better or worse. Sound can be the disturbing noise of a drill, a merry little tune sung by a friend, the song of a bird in the morning or a clap of thunder at night. The science of sound, or acoustics, studies all types of sounds and therefore...

This first contact with sound within R reveals the peculiarities of R objects that can contain sound. Sound-specific classes are introduced in details and the different solutions to read (load), play (listen), record (sample), and write (save) sounds are reported.

The techniques to take time ×-amplitude measurements first consist in measuring signal and pause durations either through a manual and visual process or with the help of an automatic segmentation process. Because time variations are tidily linked to amplitude variations, amplitude modulations properties can also be estimated through a Fourier analy...

The use of the softwave R is introduced such that R codes shown in the following chapters can be understood and repeated. This introduction is a friendly guide to quickly speak R language covering topics from R local installation on a personal computer to script writing for batch processing. More specifically, objects, operators, functions, indexes...

Frequency variations according to time can be estimated by tracking specific features along time. Solutions are proposed to follow the time variation of the dominant frequency, the fundamental frequency, and speech formants. The Hilbert analytic signal and the zero-crossing method are shown to estimate the instantaneous frequency, and the Teager-Ka...

Detailed instructions are given to edit, that is to manipulate in time and or amplitude, a sound. These edition facilities include resampling, channels management, time edition (cutting, deleting, pasting, repeating, reversing, managing silence sections) and amplitude changes (removing offset, changing the amplitude level, fading in and out effect)...

Ecoacoustics aims at studying acoustic populations, communities, and landscapes for research in ecology. Ecoacoustics uses several acoustic indices to feature outdoor recordings. The main α and β ecoustic indices are reviewed one by one and statistic solutions are provided to treat dissimilarity matrices built with β indices. Audio files:forest.wav...

The options to assess the amplitude features of a sound are reviewed. This, in particular, includes details about the different amplitude scales (linear or logarithmic, relative or absolute), the parameters characterizing the amplitude as the crest, the root-mean-square, the signal-to-noise ratio, and the dB unit. Information about the delicate que...

Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and linear predictive coefficients (LPCs) are features used to describe sound according to time, frequency, and amplitude. These techniques, which are mainly used in speech analysis, are reviewed step by step for a good understanding and practice.

Variations of amplitude and frequency according to timeare commonly visualised through a time × frequency × amplitude density plot, named the spectrogram. The theory of the short-time discrete Fourier transform (and its inverse function), which is behind the spectrogram output, is introduced with a particular attention paid to the uncertainty princ...

Indications are provided to apply frequency filters to remove unwanted sounds according to frequency. This covers filters with predefined frequency transfer functions, as the preemphasis and Butterworth filters, and filters which cutoff frequencies can be defined by the user, that is, filters based on the short-time Fourier transform and finite imp...

Sound must be displayed so that it can be explored and described. The most intuitive way to visualize sound is to build a time × amplitude plot. Several options to produce an oscillogram are given, so that high-level graphics including color tuning, text annotations, and image overlays can be obtained. The computation and display of the absolute an...

Synthesis of sound is possible thanks to a few functions that can generate noises, pulses, square signals, sawtooth signals, triangle signals, pure tones, chirps, harmonic series, amplitude and/or frequency modulated sounds. Additive synthesis, modulation synthesis, tonal synthesis and speech synthesis are reviewed.

Sound main properties are overviewed with no reference to R. Sound is first introduced as a mechanical wave with reference to the essential features commonly used for signal description, i.e., amplitude, phase, duration, and frequency. Sound is then considered in a statistical way as a time series, in an electronic framework as a digital object, an...

The options to compute, display, and describe the frequency spectrum are reviewed. This includes the use of different frequency and amplitude scales, the automatic detection of frequency peaks in particular the fundamental frequency peak and the dominant frequency peak, the identification of harmonics series, the principle of symbolic aggregate app...

Several sound modifications are reported in the frequency domain but also in the time and amplitude domains. This covers changing the amplitude envelope, adding echoes and reverberations, and changing independently the frequency and time content through the use of the inverse short-term Fourier transform or the Hilbert analytic signal.

Cross-correlation of amplitude envelopes, frequency spectra, and spectrograms are evoked together with the computation of the frequency coherence as solutions to compare two sounds. The dynamic time warping technique, that seeks for the best alignments of time series of unequal length, is also covered. A recipe is provided to run a supervised binar...

The Fourier transformation is a key mathematical tool that connects the time and frequency domains such that sound can be parametrized in terms of frequency. The theory of the different Fourier transforms, including the inverse transform, is presented to facilitate the reading of the following chapters. Each mathematical equation is translated into...

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...

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...

The sounds produced by animals have been a topic of research into animal behaviour for a very long time. If acoustic signals are undoubtedly a vehicle for exchanging information between individuals, environmental sounds embed as well a significant level of data related to the ecology of populations, communities and landscapes. The consideration of...

Case 239; see BZN 41: 163–184; 71: 103–131; 179–180; 72: 217–219.

La sonothèque du Muséum. 20 espèces / 83 enregistrements / 74'05 minutes / Un livret dans le CD présente en détail tous les enregistrements. 01-07.La Cigale plébéienne (Lyriste plebejus ) 08-17.La Cigale grise (Cicada orni) 18-22.La Cigale noire (Cicadatra atra) 23-24.La Cigale corse (Tibicina corsica corsica) 25-29.La Cigale des cistes (Tibicina c...

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...

A part of biodiversity assessment and monitoring consists in the estimation and track of the changes in species composition and abundance of animal communities. Such a task requires an important sampling over a broad‐scale time that is difficult to reach with classical survey methods. Acoustics may offer an alternative to usual techniques by record...

The matched filter hypothesis proposes that the tuning of females' auditory sensitivity matches the spectral energy distribution of males' signals. Such correspondence is expected to arise over evolutionary time, as it promotes conspecific information transfer and reduces interference from other sound sources. Our main objective was to determine th...

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...

The bioacoustic event indexing has to be scaled in space (oceans and large forests, multiple sensors), and in species number (thousand). We discuss why time-frequency featuring is inefficient compared to the sparse coding (SC) for soundscape analysis. SC is based on the principle that an optimal code should contain enough information to reconstruct...

While spatial heterogeneity is one the most studied ecological concepts, few or no studies have dealt with the subject of ambient sound heterogeneity from an ecological perspective. Similarly to ambient light conditions, which have been shown to play a significant role in ecological speciation, we investigated the existence of ambient sound heterog...

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...

The cicada Dimissalna dimissa (Hagen 1856) is reported for the first time in France. This cicada was previously thought to occur in Eastern Europe only. D. dimissa has been found in the Païolive wood close to Berrias-et-Casteljau and Les Vans, as well as in Vallon-Pont-d'Arc (Ardèche). Time and frequency parameters of the calling song are similar t...

To communicate at long range, animals have to produce intense but intelligible signals. This task might be difficult to achieve due to mechanical constraints, in particular relating to body size. Whilst the acoustic behaviour of large marine and terrestrial animals has been thoroughly studied, very little is known about the sound produced by small...