From landscape to soundscape: what drives spatial variation in natural soundscape characteristics?

Natural soundscapes are a fundamental property of the distinctiveness of place and a key pathway for engaging with, and deriving health and well-being benefits from, nature. More complex soundscapes can improve people's experience of nature and increase the value placed on natural environments. In temperate systems, birds play a dominant role in defining soundscape characteristics, with their acoustic properties determined by the diversity and abundance of vocalising species. In turn, avian community composition is fundamentally underpinned by factors such as location, habitat availability, and landscape configuration.
Natural soundscapes are under growing threat. Land-use change, urbanisation and agricultural intensification are driving changes in avian community composition, with potentially widespread and profound detrimental implications for human health and well-being. Whilst the importance of conserving natural soundscapes is increasingly recognised, the mechanistic links between landscape and soundscape, and therefore the principal drivers of spatial and temporal variation in natural soundscapes, remain largely unknown. Addressing this knowledge gap is critical to preserving and restoring natural soundscapes and protecting the health and well-being benefits they support.
PI Butler has recently developed an analytical pipeline that combines avian assemblage data with recordings of individual species to reconstruct soundscapes over large temporal and spatial scales (Morrison et al 2021). In this project, the student will apply this approach to BTO's Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) data (1994-2022) to reconstruct and map the acoustic properties of natural soundscapes across the UK. Annual count data will be combined with sound files from Xeno-Canto (www.xeno-canto.org) to construct habitat- and year-specific soundscapes for each BBS square, providing the first detailed study of soundscape variation at the scale humans experience these soundscapes. An ensemble of acoustic indices will be used to quantify the properties of constructed soundscapes and to determine the relationship between natural soundscape characteristics and landscape composition/configuration, quantifying the influence of e.g. habitat availability and diversity, agricultural intensity, human infrastructure (transport, buildings etc), elevation, longitude, and latitude and building a predictive framework. This approach will also be applied to data collected during summer and winter surveys for the UK 2007-11 Bird Atlas to construct seasonal soundscapes for every 10-km square across the UK and quantify intra-annual variation and spatial consistency in soundscape characteristics across seasons.
Acoustic ecology is a rapidly developing field of scientific study with great potential to further fundamental ecological knowledge about the sonic environment, as well as deepen our understanding of human-wildlife experiences and the benefits they convey. The student will lead this project and will have the opportunity to tailor aspects of the project towards areas they are specifically interested in. They will develop strong skills in advanced data handling and analysis and will gain experience by presenting results at national and international conferences.