Nadia Pieretti

Recent offshore windfarm development has led to increased vessel traffic in the Eastern Taiwan Strait, which is part of the habitat of the critically endangered Taiwanese humpback dolphin (Sousa chinensis taiwanensis). However, data on possible effects on the behavior of this endemic subspecies are lacking to date. In this study, we observed Taiwan...

Understanding drivers and monitoring changes of biodiversity forms the basis for evidence-based management and policy recommendations that aim to reduce biodiversity loss and to ensure the delivery of ecosystem services on which we rely. Ecoacoustic monitoring can be applied across large spatial and temporal scales, offering the potential for less...

Abstract Offshore windfarms have recently emerged as a renewable energy solution. The effects of pile‐driving and long‐term impacts of operational noises on fish chorusing still, however, remain largely unknown. In this study, we investigated the variations of fish chorusing intensity and duration during the construction (2016) and operational phas...

Anthropogenic noise, which is part of an urban soundscape, can negatively affect the behaviour of wild animals. Here we investigated how biophony (animal sounds) was affected by noise in an urban Brazilian forest fragment. Our hypothesis was that noise and biophony would differ between the border and the centre of the forest fragment (i.e., lower b...

The analysis of temporal trends and spatial patterns of marine sounds can provide crucial insights to assess the abundance, distribution, and behavior of fishes and of many other species. However, data on species-specific temporal and seasonal changes are still extremely limited. We report here the result of the longest recording ever conducted (fi...

Wildfire is a natural process in Brazilian savannas, but human activities alter fire regimes and threaten biodiversity. In this study, weused an ecoacoustics approach to assess fauna responses and recovery after wildfire in a Brazilian savanna. Six passive acoustic monitoring devices were used to record soundscapes before and after a wildfire a at...

Acoustic approaches have been recently proposed to investigate critical ecological issues, such as biodiversity loss and different typologies of impacts, including climate change. However, the extensive use of acoustic monitoring is hampered by the lack of algorithms enabling the discrimination among different sound sources (e.g. geophysical, anthr...

Long-term monitoring of cetacean vocalizations allows for the exploration of their occurrence, seasonality and abundance. However, accurate automatic detection of vocalizations from vast acoustic datasets containing diverse sound sources remains a challenge. In this study, we propose the permutation entropy (H) and the sample entropy (SE) as metric...

Cabled video-observatories offer new opportunities to monitor fish species at frequencies and durations never attained before, quantifying the behavioural activities of their individuals, and providing ancillary data to inform stock assessment (in a fishery-independent manner). In this context, our objective was to improve the ecological monitoring...

Underwater noise is one of the most widespread threats to the world oceans. Its negative impact on fauna is nowadays well established, but baseline data to be used in management and monitoring programs are still largely lacking. In particular, the acoustic assessment of human-impacted marine coastal areas provides complementary information on the h...

We have found an error in the order of one author’s name and surname in the article recently published in Entropy [1]: Shashidhar Siddagangaiah 1,*, Chi-Fang Chen 1,*, Wei-Chun Hu 1 and Pieretti Nadia 2 that should be corrected to the following order in this paper [1]: Shashidhar Siddagangaiah 1,*, Chi-Fang Chen 1,*, Wei-Chun Hu 1 and Nadia Pierett...

Automated acoustic indices to infer biological sounds from marine recordings have produced mixed levels of success. The use of such indices in complex marine environments, dominated by several anthropogenic and geophonic sources, have yet to be understood fully. In this study, we introduce a noise resilient method based on complexity-entropy (herea...

Acoustic monitoring can provide essential information on marine environments, including insights into ecosystem functioning and marine biodiversity monitoring. However, data on species acoustic behavior and ecoacoustics studies in the Mediterranean Sea are still extremely scarce and this limits our ability to use soundscape features in monitoring s...

Biodiversity also entails the diversity of genes, chemical diversity, and the diversity of ecosystems on the planet, regarding all levels of the hierarchy of life, from molecules to ecosystems. Sound is used by many animals as a carrier of meaning to maintain intra- and interspecific communication, to incorporate into a cognitive process their acou...

The study of marine soundscapes is an emerging field of research that contributes important information about biological compositions and environmental conditions. The seasonal and circadian soundscape trends of a marine protected area (MPA) in the Mediterranean Sea have been studied for one year using an autonomous acoustic recorder. Frequencies l...

Heavy metals such as mercury (Hg) pose a significant health hazard through bioaccumulation and biomagnification. By penetrating cell membranes, heavy metal ions may lead to pathological conditions. Here we examined the responses of Ammonia parkinsoniana, a benthic foraminiferan, to different concentrations of Hg in the artificial sea water. Confoca...

Mann-Whitney U Test for differences lipid dimension. Significant differences are marked in bold. (XLS)

Typical paired NR confocal images. (A) Bright Field image. (B) Neutral lipids (triglycerides, esters of cholesterol and free fatty acids) in yellow. (C) Polar lipids (phospholipids, sphingolipids and non-esterified cholesterol) in red. (D) Merged Bright Field, yellow and red channels. (TIF)

Lipid dimension counting. (XLSX)

In programs of acoustic survey, the amount of data collected and the lack of automatic routines for their classification and interpretation can represent a serious obstacle to achieving quick results. To overcome these obstacles, we are proposing an ecosemiotic model of data mining, ecoacoustic event detection and identification (EEDI), that uses a...

Ecoacoustic techniques using multiple acoustic sensors and two metrics of the acoustic community – the acoustic complexity index (ACI) and the chorus ratio (CR) – were successfully used to describe and characterize the morning acoustic activity of birds according to three equal temporal intervals during spring 2013: Dawn Chorus, Post Chorus 1, and...

Among different approaches to exploring and describing the ecological complexity of natural environments, soundscape analyses have recently provided useful proxies for understanding and interpreting dynamic patterns and processes in a landscape. Nevertheless, the study of soundscapes remains a new field with no internationally accepted protocols. T...

Low cost (audio) recorders (LCRs) represent a new opportunity to investigate the sonic complexity of both natural and urban ecosystems. LCRs are inexpensive sampling audio recorders which have the external shape of a universal serial bus (USB) flash drive, and are composed of a microphone, an analog-to-digital converter, central processing unit wit...

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...

Acoustic codes assure the intra and interspecific communication of vocal animals. They are composed by a sequence of nominal entities (syllables, words and sentences) and by magnitude modulation confirming in such a way contemporarily a behavioural and ecological nature. The acoustic codes find evidence in the acoustic niche hypothesis by which spe...

The fine-grained mosaic of natural and human-modified patches that characterizes the Mediterranean region has created a multifaceted system that is difficult to investigate using traditional ecological techniques. In this context, sounds have been found to be the optimum model to provide indirect and timely information about the state of ecosystems...

The soundscape, which is defined as the entire acoustic environment of an area, is a relevant biosemiotic ingredient of environmental complexity. It is composed of geophonies, anthrophonies, and biophonies where, in temperate biomes, birds are the major producers of the latter. The soundscape is heterogeneous in terms of space and time, and is affe...

The Red-billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea) is an invasive species which has recently been found to be locally abundant in eastern Liguria (Italy). The song production of this bird was recorded over the course of an entire year (2011) and evaluated using both aural information and applying innovative automatic processing metrics. Our findings reveal...

An altered acoustic environment can have severe consequences for natural communities, especially for species that use acoustic signals to communicate and achieve breeding success. Numerous studies have focused on traffic noise disturbance, but the possible causes of road effects are inter-correlated and the literature on noise qua noise is sometime...

Capturing information means for every organism acquiring knowledge about the living and not living objects that exist in its surroundings. In this way, the “historical” concept of Umwelt, as a subjective surrounding has been recently integrated in the theory of landscape ecology where a landscape is not only a geographical entity but also a cogniti...

When animals live in cities, they have to adjust their behaviour and life histories to novel environments. Noise pollution puts a severe constraint on vocal communication by interfering with the detection of acoustic signals. Recent studies show that city birds sing higher-frequency songs than their conspecifics in non-urban habitats. This has been...

When animals live in cities, they have to adjust their behaviour and life histories to novel environments. Noise pollution puts a severe constraint on vocal communication by interfering with the detection of acoustic signals. Recent studies show that city birds sing higher-frequency songs than their con-specifics in non-urban habitats. This has bee...

Islands and mainland coastal ranges are fragile systems rich in biological endemisms and ecological peculiarities. In these environments, the cultural heritage that represents an important component of the overall ecological complexity is under attack from human pressures (urban sprawl, logistics, fish farming and mass tourism). Among the most valu...

The soundscape is proposed as a phenomenological entity with which to investigate environmental complexity. In particular, the avian soundtope, which is defined as a place in which sound is intentionally structured by different bird species, is regarded as an agency acting to achieve several goals. In fact, the soundtope could be viewed as a specia...

The soundscape represents the acoustic footprint of a landscape, and may well be a source of a vast amount of information that could be used efficiently in, for example, long-term bird aggregation monitoring schemes. To depict such soundscape footprint, specific indexes are requested. In particular, the aim of this paper was to extensively describe...

This article presents a unifying theory of soundscape ecology, which brings the idea of the soundscape—the collection of sounds that emanate from landscapes—into a research and application focus. Our conceptual framework of soundscape ecology is based on the causes and consequences of biological (biophony), geophysical (geophony), and human-produce...

The animal soundscape is a field of growing interest because of the implications it has for human–landscape interactions. Yet, it continues to be a difficult subject to investigate, due to the huge amount of information which it contains. In this contribution, the suitability of the Acoustic Complexity Index (ACI) is examined. It is an algorithm cr...