Rapid Acoustic Survey for Biodiversity Appraisal

Biodiversity assessment remains one of the most difficult challenges encountered by ecologists and conservation biologists. This task is becoming even more urgent with the current increase of habitat loss. Many methods-from rapid biodiversity assessments (RBA) to all-taxa biodiversity inventories (ATBI)-have been developed for decades to estimate local species richness. However, these methods are costly and invasive. Several animals-birds, mammals, amphibians, fishes and arthropods-produce sounds when moving, communicating or sensing their environment. Here we propose a new concept and method to describe biodiversity. We suggest to forego species or morphospecies identification used by ATBI and RBA…

• UO
  University of Cambridge
• EC
  European Commission
• TC
  Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology