David Abram, whose widely acclaimed first book, The Spell of the Sensuous, addressed the mixed legacy of the written word in our culture, has released a new one, Becoming Animal, which draws on another decade of deep experience with the human and more-than-human world.  While the first book was his Ph.D. project, and veered deeply into academic phenomenology in an effort to contribute some fresh ideas in that field, the new one is much more rooted in David’s stellar storytelling voice.  David’s always been a strong advocate for my work with acoustic ecology, as his vision has much in common with our intention to listen more clearly to the voices around us.

Learn more about Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology on David’s Alliance for Wild Ethics website; there are a few short videos there as well, providing a quick taste of his uniquely engaged mind and heart.

An article in Der Spiegel reveals that the environmental impact study at a 12-turbine wind farm 30km off the coast of Germany has reported that during construction of the turbines, porpoises avoided an area in a 20-mile radius of the two-square mile construction site.  Harbor porpoises are well known to be more sensitive to sound than many ocean creatures, and may serve as a sort of “canary in the construction zone,” their stark behavioral response standing as an indicator of noise levels that likely interfere with other animals, as well.

Future construction could affect a far larger number of animals than the relatively modest construction that has taken place so far. (click to see larger Der Spiegel image)

Wyoming has been at the center of the storm over how much wind farm developers should be subject to limits on development in the name of protecting wildlife habitat, thanks to the hot-button issue of the sage grouse, which has been dancing on the edge of federal endangered species listing for several years. In general, with the exception of bird and bat deaths caused by flying into or near whirling turbine blades, wind farms have been assumed to be benign in relation to wildlife habitat.  The noise made by turbines is considered to be moderate enough to have minimal impact on nearby wildlife (though recent National Park Service research that quantifies the dramatic reductions in listening area caused by small increases in background noise may eventually change this thinking).

This week, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department approved a set of recommendations that will guide the Wyoming Industrial Siting Council on permit applications for major projects in the state, including wind farms numbering at least 30 turbines. Under the guidelines, construction activity will be halted within two miles of an active grouse lek during the mating season each spring, though turbines will be allowed to operate in any location more than a quarter mile from a lek (increased to six tenths of a mile for one species). Restrictions on wind farms within two miles of wildlife refuges were softened in the final draft, which requires simply that developers coordinate with the Game and Fish Department and US Fish and Wildlife Service when building near refuges or state wildlife management areas.  Developers are urged to avoid big game wintering and birthing ranges, but if siting in these areas “cannot be avoided,” then construction activity must cease during the relevant times of year; again, construction is assumed to be a disturbance, while operations are assumed to be benign.

Many ranchers opposed the new rules, citing private property rights, while environmental advocates urged larger buffers, including six-tenths of a mile for all species. ”You’ve got one set of concerns saying we don’t have enough restriction, and the other side saying we’ve got way too much,” WGFD deputy director John Emmerich said. “I think we’ve done a credible job of trying to address the needs for wildlife and still accommodate reasonable levels of development.”

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner and Casper Tribune, and download the recommendations here.

UPDATE 3/25: In response to a quick wave of outrage on editorial pages and some Park Service lobbying, Senator McCain has withdrawn his proposed amendment.  It remains to be seen whether he will let the NPS EIS process set the final rules, or seek to have the Senate write rules if the process lags or heads toward a resolution that differs from his sense of the proper balance.

That John McCain can sure be a puzzle.  Or is it a case of the old maverick’s bait and switch, staking the high moral ground while pursuing a typically old-guard agenda?  Whatever he’s up to, let’s hope the rest of his Senate colleagues don’t buy into it.  Way back in 1987 McCain led the push to enact the National Parks Overflights Act, which called for the FAA and NPS to come up with a plan to reduce the aircraft noise experienced by Grand Canyon visitors.  This was a truly welcome and indeed, maverick move.  In the 23 years since then,  as noted by the Arizona Republic this week, “the process of adopting a noise-management plan often seemed to move at the same geological pace as the forces shaping the Canyon. ”  This has frustrated advocates for natural quiet, and it has frustrated Senator McCain.  So when the Senator introduced an amendment last week to codify air tour rules, saying that  the amendment reduces excessive aircraft noise “without waiting another 23 years for progress,” it might appear that he’s still taking the high road, standing up to the ridiculous bureaucracy.

But wait: what the good Senator neglected to mention is that the NPS Environmental Impact Statement governing overflights is due out sometime in April.  Yes, the 23-year wait is at its end, after years of collaborative dialogue and NPS research, and within a few weeks, we’ll see what the NPS has proposed.  Yet for some reason, the great champion of the process wants to undercut that work and impose his own version of what would be right and good.  According to the National Parks Conservation Association, the plan McCain is putting forward would allow more air tours than are currently permitted, and otherwise constrain the Park Service’s ability to manage air tours in order to fulfill the original 1987 Act’s stated purpose of “substantial restoration of natural quiet.”  While most of McCain’s amendment seems to mimic what the NPS has indicated it’s aiming for, an FAA-convened working group fell apart over some of the NPS ideas, seasonal limits on certain popular air-tour corridors.  Air tour managers were upset at some NPS provisions, and in the wake of the group’s failure, the FAA’s role is diminished as the NPS moves ahead.  While the EIS is due in April, comment period will follow, and of course, lawsuits by air tour groups or environmentalists looking for more quiet could also delay implementation.  All this may well fuel McCain’s efforts to get something closer to the FAA or air tour groups’ sense of a fair balance into law, rather than wait through the likely challenges.

The Senate is likely to vote on McCain’s amendment this week; the measure may well slip through, as it is co-sponsored by both Arizona and both Nevada Senators (yes, Harry Reid); many air tours originate in Las Vegas.  The NPCA is urging members to call their Senators, and the Arizona Republic also weighed in against short-circuiting the nearly completed EIS.  (Ironically, the NPCA honored McCain in 2001 for his leadership on the overflight issue.)  See also Senator McCain’s floor statement, and the text of his amendment.  If you do call your Senator, this is Amendment 3528, being attached to the Senate’s consideration of HR 1586, which proposes a tax on bonuses paid by some recipients of TARP funds.

A key research paper from National Park Service and Colorado State scientists has been published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.  The paper, which got a lot of press when it was first made available online in the fall, introduces two key new metrics for measuring the effects of noise on animals.  The first, “alerting distance,” is the distance at which sounds can be heard: these may be sounds made by a species to alert others to danger, or sounds made by predators (which prey animals want to hear, so as to take cover).  The second, is “listening area,” the full area around an animal in which it can hear other animals’ calls, footsteps, and wingbeats.  A key insight offered by this approach is that even moderate increases in background noise (from nearby roads, airplanes, or wind farms) can drastically reduce an animal’s listening area.  The paper, which was free while in pre-press, is now available only to subscribers to the journal or other academic journal services; an article published in Park Science magazine and free to view online introduces much of the same material (be sure to click on the links to the figures, as they illustrate the concepts very well): see the article here, and check out the entire special soundscapes issue of Park Science here.

A very good article in the Aspen Times introduces the research, and includes many extremely insightful quotes from the researchers.  Go read the whole article! Three bits that are especially worth keeping mind are:

• “The male sage grouse, in its mating displays, produces high-frequency popping sounds and swishing sounds,” Fristrup said. “It also uses a low-pitch hooting sound, which carries the farthest from the display area as a long-distance advertisement. The danger is, it doesn’t take a lot of noise to substantially reduce the range at which females or other males could hear that low-frequency hoot. So the attraction radius of the display ground could contract substantially with the inability to hear a hoot.” The authors note that some species can reduce the effects of masking by shifting their vocalizations. This is especially true when members of a species are communicating with each other. However, when the sounds a species depends on emanate from another species (such as a mouse burrowing under the snow, which an owl needs to hear as it hunts), there is less room for compensation.
• Carnivores like lynx, who sit at the top of the food chain, can be particularly sensitive to habitat degradation of any type — including auditory — since each individual requires a huge hunting territory. “If one part of the range of a top-level predator is compromised, it may not take much to squeeze it out,” Fristrup said.
• Contrary to what one might expect, noise is not always more disruptive when it’s louder. Snowmobiles or cars, for example, might be less disruptive to elk or deer than a hiker or cross county skier would be. “There’s pretty good evidence that so-called quiet use can disturb wildlife. If it’s a noisy source, the animal perceives it a long way off and can track its progress. There are no surprises, and it can go on feeding or doing whatever else. A quiet sound, like a snowshoer’s footstep, is only perceptible when it is very close, potentially startling the animal,” Fristrup said.

To read AEI’s detailed lay summary of the research paper, published here in December, see this link.

Zion National Park is gearing up to begin incorporating soundscape planning into their management priorities.  Park Superintendent Jock Whitworth has announced two open houses in March on the topic, and public comments are being accepted until April 9 as part of an initial information-gathering stage.  This will inform the drafting of a Soundscape Management Plan Environmental Assessment, which will aim to to link soundscape management to the existing park management direction, and “ensure that natural soundscapes are protected for present and future generations.”

Zion NP. Photo: David Iliff

To participate in the public comment process, see this National Park planning page.

You can also learn more about the Park Service’s efforts to protect natural soundscapes by visiting the NPS Natural Sounds Program website, and by reading this 2007 review of Park Service soundscape management by sound consultant Nick Miller.

This one slipped past me when it happened last June, but it’s well worth noting now.  Complicating assessments of the risks of bird deaths at wind farms is the fact that two-thirds of migrating bird species migrate mainly at night; Cornell’s Bioacoustics Research Program, which has already done groundbreaking work in elephant communication and underwater listening systems, has proposed that combining their autonomous recording devices with radar data could provide the missing information on exactly when and where concentrations of migrating birds may exist near proposed wind farms.

A compelling animation highlights the large-scale patterns: The color-coded radar map illustrates areas of precipitation over the coasts as well as vast movements of tens of millions of birds, bats and insects across the entire country. In the densest areas, the color-scales indicate movement of 2,000 birds per cubic kilometer. ”You’re talking about a massive movement of birds overnight,” said post-doctoral fellow Andrew Farnsworth.

Radar imagery of night-migrating birds, bats, and insects

Although radar data can show the magnitude, location, timing, speed and direction of migration patterns and provide information on key stopover sites, they do not identify types of birds or accurate flight altitudes, Farnsworth said. But combining radar data with data from flight call recordings and tracking tags on birds could allow researchers to identify many species in key areas. Bioacoustics program director Chris Clark added that recorders are cost effective, can be automated for many months at remote sites, provide data on many species simultaneously, increase the probability of tracking secretive and endangered species, and could allow regulatory agencies to develop computer models to assess risks to birds from wind turbines. He acknowledged, however, that using such acoustic technology could produce a massive “data crunch”; a single microphone over a three-to-four-month period can record 120 to 140 gigabytes of data, so data from several hundred microphones would be too much to process without advanced software. Also, researchers would need to better recognize the wide variety of flight calls and learn to integrate data from radar with those from acoustics and tracking tags, he added. More research is needed, Clark stressed, to determine at what altitudes species tend to fly and whether birds sense turbine blades and avoid them.  Read full account of the presentation in the Cornell Chronicle, with link to the radar map animation.

In the most promising development yet in using acoustics to deal with the spread of bark beetles in the American and Canadian west, researchers at Northern Arizona University have found that some beetles can be disrupted by playback of other beetle sounds. The tiny insects make squeaking noises as they tunnel through trees; the researchers have been manipulating the beetle sounds, which are above human hearing, and playing them back to the insects. The results drive them buggy: They attack each other, scamper in circles rather than straight lines and have tried to gnaw their way through Plexiglas covering a cross section of a tree in a lab in Flagstaff, Ariz.

A great article in The Missoulan included these tidbits from NAU researchers Richard Hofstetter and Reagan McGuire, Skye Stephens, an entomologist with the Colorado State Forest Service, and David Dunn, a sound artist who discovered and first recorded the beetle sounds:

“One of the questions is if we could effectively remove them from a particular tree or set of trees, where do they go, what happens to them?” Stephens said. “I’m very excited to see what happens next” with the research. Hofstetter and McGuire are eager to run tests on the ground to answer questions like that. Working with Dunn, they have applied for a patent on a device that pumps in noise to throw off the beetles’ destructive course. Hofstetter said the sounds are at a frequency that shouldn’t bother other species. The work has been a side project for the professor, who has struggled to scrape together funding for the research. McGuire is volunteering his time. ”We’re hoping it’s going to lead to a whole new field,” Hofstetter said.

David Dunn, who has traveled the world collecting sounds of nature for his compositions, first started recording the inner life of trees in 2004. He took the kind of small microphone used in greeting cards to record and play, fastened it to a recycled meat thermometer and inserted it into the tree. While concerned about the dying trees and what they signal about climate change, Dunn has become intrigued by the beetles, “an absolutely fascinating form of life. I fell in love with them,” Dunn said. “But then we’re watching them cannibalize each other. I always think, ‘How bad is this karma?’

“But if something really positive about forest health comes of it, perhaps it’s worth the price.”

Dunn’s CD, The Sound of Light in Trees, was released by EarthEar; 100% of all sales revenues are donated by Dunn and EarthEar to support the Acoustic Ecology Institute.  See more on the CD and beetle project on AEI’s website.

Ongoing research in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary is providing ever more compelling visualizations of shipping noise and the much quieter calls of whales in the area. Scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, NMFS, and Cornell have deployed networks of sound recorders, which allow them to track individual whales and ships and see how their sounds interact.  The Sanctuary, which contains the shipping lanes into Boston harbor, is one of the more urbanized ocean environments to be closely studied thus far.  Here, we see four panels; the top left is wind noise, bottom left is right whales, and the right hand ones show that two ships completely drown out the whales as they pass through the area. “Every day, five to six large ships move into and out of Boston, and their acoustic footprint can last for hours.” says Cornell’s Chris Clark. “As a result, the Right whales trying to make a living off Boston are losing about 80 percent of their opportunities to keep in contact every day, day after day, month after month, year after year.”

From Sciencemag.com; click to read source article

“Right whales are long-lived animals. When they were kids and teenagers, their world was normal,” Clark says. “Acoustic habitat loss is a stressor and there are multiple stressors on a species.” His team has found that the whales often no longer bother answering calls from their peers. In this world of constant noise, they wouldn’t be heard anyway. ”Their social network is constantly ripped apart,” says Clark. “In one area, noise levels are now 105 decibel where they should be 75.” Other researchers from the Right Whale Consortium found that the animals show dramatic loss in vital body fat: In some individuals, the blubber layer is thinner than normal, hinting at the possibility that they no longer find enough food due to the noise.

At conferences over the past year, project scientists have shared compelling animated sequences showing similar patterns; so far, only still images are available online. UPDATE! A recent article on this work in the journal Science (from which the Clark quotes above were drawn) has a link to a good video (note: the video has minimal interpretation. I find the upper left graph most compelling: it shows the whale call (in blue), loud near the whale and fainter as the cone spreads out; the red disc is the noise from the ship, gradually getting louder than the whale calls, until it drowns out the whale everywhere except very nearby). For more on this important research, see this recent article which contains two stills from a different animation, this section of the Stellwagen website on the passive acoustic monitoring program,  this movie which visualizes the movements and sounds of two nearby and some more distant humpback whales, and hear this local radio piece on the Stellwagen research.

The most recent issue of the Marine Ecosystem and Management newsletter (download here) has several features that offer a good sense of current efforts to adopt Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) and its related management principle, Ecosystem Based Management (ESB).  The lead article centers on reports from Massachusetts, Norway, and Germany, each oriented toward the relationship between MSP and ESB.  Shorter pieces include interrviews on related topics and direct readers to recent management plans, proposals, and reports by the US Federal Government, the State of Massachusetts, and Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in Hawaii.  For more on MEAM programs and publications, see the MEAM website.

The final EIS in the Navy’s multi-year effort to get its training activities into legal compliance with NEPA requirements is heading for the finish line.  Adding to the drama, however, is the fact that the Navy is pushing to introduce active sonar training into the Gulf of Alaska—while previous EISs at other training ranges proposed continuing sonar training at or near levels that have been taking place for years, the Alaskan proposal would bring sonar training for the first time into Alaskan waters rich with marine mammal habitat.  While the Alaskan range where sonar training would take place is relatively small compared to many of the other ranges on the east and west coasts of the continental US, it is within dozens of miles of key whale habitat, and locals have expressed much concern at public hearings.  For more detail, see these links to Alaskan newspaper coverage.

Meanwhile, as the Navy completes the EIS, it has also applied for the Incidental Harassment Authorization from the National Marine Fisheries Service, which announced in early February its intention to issue a Letter of Authorization to permit Navy activities as planned from December 2010 to December 2015.  The Navy estimates that its covered activities will take individuals of 20 species of marine mammals (15 cetaceans and 5 pinnipeds) through Level B behavioral harassment. ”Further, the Navy requests authorization to take 3 individual beaked whales (of any of the following species: Baird’s beaked whale, Cuvier’s beaked whale, Stejneger’s beaked whale) annually by serious injury or mortality.” See the Navy’s IHA application here, and NMFS notice of intent to issue the LOA here.

The latest in AEI’s ongoing series of comprehensive special reports on key topics is finally done!

This one is modeled on AEI’s acclaimed annual reviews of science and policy developments in ocean noise, but focuses for the first time on wind farm noise issues.  The 30-page report covers new research, public concerns, and industry trends over the past year.

Read the report in the embedded pdf reader below, or download a pdf copy.  Click on to below the fold for a table of contents and the report’s brief Introduction.

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This came out in December, but I forgot to post about it then.  The National Park Service’s science magazine has published an entire issue devoted to the NPS’s soundscape studies and programs.

A couple strolls through Cathedral Grove on a quiet morning in winter when visitation is typically low. Signage at the entrance to this area reminds visitors that they are in a quiet zone. (NPS Photo/Lou Sian)

Articles include:

• Measuring and monitoring soundscapes in the national parks
• Integrating soundscapes into NPS planning
• Conserving the wild life therein–Protecting park fauna from anthropogenic noise
• Soundscapes monitoring and an overflight advisory group: Informing real-time management decisions at Denali
• Soundscape management at Grand Canyon National Park
• Generator noise along the US-Mexico border
• A program of research to support management of visitor-caused noise at Muir Woods National Monument

And, as they say, much, much more!  See the issue online here; from there, you can read every article in full. Note that the html views break each article into several separate pages, but you can also view in a “printer-ready” format that loads the entire article into a FlashPaper format, or you can view or download the full articles as pdfs.

Very cool collection of various approaches to sound mapping, recently posted at Weird Vibrations.  Here’s the first post, sharing their overview of several sound mapping models, including collaborative documentary, composition, preservation, and policy-oriented.  And here’s a follow-up post of others sent in by readers.  And to go one step further, here’s a delicious link from a commenter, to his own collection of sound maps.  And, oh, what the heck: here’s the current list of sound maps from AEI’s main site!

Paris Sound Map (click to read 1st post)

Those of you who were attracted to this particular post topic may well also enjoy checking by Weird Vibrations this week, where they’ve just begun an “open thread” on Acoustic Ecology, centered around their upcoming reviews of Gordon Hempton’s One Square Inch book, and a book on sound weapons; the initial questions posed are promisingly provocative: “ First, is understanding sound as an ecosystem practical? In other words, can this formulation help us deal with noise in a just fashion? How does the ecological metaphor sit with you? Second, does acoustic ecology’s focus on “natural” preservation make it essentially conservative? This is a charge that’s latent (if not explicit) in some recent Sound Studies work that foregrounds technology. What do you think?”

In the best overview I’ve yet seen of efforts to solve the “problem” of electric cars being so quiet, the New York Times Wheels blog provides a tour of the the apparently burgeoning of field sound design for these future (and increasingly, present-day) vehicles.  Most designs plan to incorporate sounds that will alert nearby pedestrians of a car nearby, but will only emit sound when the car is slow-moving (above 12 or 15 mph, tire noise will be sufficient).

A speaker embedded in the bumper of a Fisker Karma (click to read NY Times blog post)

Among the key questions is whether electric car owners will be able to customize their car’s “voice,” ala cell phone ring tones, or if they should be standardized.  So far, individual auto companies are each pursuing their own standard sounds, which could presumably become part of the “look and feel” of the car’s branding.  A Nissan engineer quoted in a September article from Bloomberg,  says that “we decided that if we’re going to do this, if we have to make sound, then we’re going to make it beautiful and futuristic.” The company decided on a high- pitched sound reminiscent of the flying cars in “Blade Runner,” the 1982 Ridley Scott film. “We wanted something a bit different, something closer to the world of art,” said the Nissan designer.  At least one acoustic design company has turned its attention to becoming the “go to” company for automakers facing this 21st century problem.  The Times blog and its accompanying article are both great reads on this fascinating – and for some anti-noise activists, frustrating – topic.

I’ve just finished reading what must be the most exciting research paper I’ve seen this year, barely nudging out a similar paper addressing terrestrial noise impacts. A small group of researchers, with Chris Clark of Cornell as the lead author, took a giant step forward in addressing the impacts of ocean noise on the communication ranges of whales.  They came up with a clear and strikingly rigorous set of new metrics that will allow researchers and ocean planners to have a much more practical picture of how numerous noise sources combine to create cumulative impacts on acoustic habitat.  The new approach centers on the “Communication Space” of individual animals, as well as groups, and provides an intuitively obvious way to both imagine and assess the effects of ocean noise – measuring the area in which an animal can hear or be heard by others of its species.

My formal “lay summary” of this paper is reprinted in full below the fold, and I encourage anyone with a deep interest in ocean noise to read through that five-paragraph overview, or to download the paper yourself.  The key takeaway for those of you with a more casual interest in these issues is that in the test case that they used to illustrate their new approach, the researchers found that shipping noise has dramatically different impacts on different species, even though all three species they studied are low-frequency communicators.  In the area off Boston Harbor that they investigated, the critically endangered right whale is by far the most affected by shipping noise: on a day when two ships passed through the area (the average is often six), right whale Communication Space was reduced by an average of 84% over the course of the day, with several hours in which they could hear and be heard in an area less then 10% of that which would be expected without shipping nearby. Since right whales call back and forth to find each other as they form groups for feeding, this is truly worrying (though the key question of how a reduced communication range actually affects animals remains unanswered).  Fin whales and humpbacks were far less dramatically affected, with their Communication Spaces reduced by just 33% and 11% respectively.

These first examples focus on the effects of low-frequency shipping noise on low-frequency communication by large whales, but this approach can easily be used to address mid- or high-frequency noise sources (sonars, airguns) and higher frequency animal sounds such as those used for echolocation, opening a vast and exceedingly useful new doorway for biologists and ocean managers, as well as the general public, to appreciate the impacts of human sounds in the sea.   (click through for complete lay summary)

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