I've been here for months surveying dozens of logged and
burned forests. My team and I have installed autonomous
acoustic sensors in the understory of nearly 40 degraded
forest fragments. We're recording soundscapes. The
soundscapes are effectively digital records of the birds,
bats, insects, frogs and mammals that together make up that
forest's distinct acoustic fingerprint. We can therefore
harvest sounds as scientific measurements. I'm Danielle
Rappaport. I'm an earth system scientists at the Amazon
investor coalition. I'm in the region known as the Ark of
Deforestation. This area is ground zero for repeated forest
fire risk. We want to know whether forests that were burned
once are ecologically similar to forests burned twice, thrice or
even five times. Can we use sound measurements of ecosystem
composition from under the forest canopy to complement our
satellite and aircraft observations from above the
forest canopy.
We are in sight 14 B. It's 1130. Tuesday the 30th. This is a site
that was burned five times. You see the majority of the forest
cover is two and a half meters. There's no there are no trees
within 50 meter diameter of us. They're only within eye distance
there's only three...
We use Landsat satellite data to survey the last 33 years of fire
logging and deforestation activity. We're now
complementing these observations of habitat structure sampled
from above the canopy with below canopy measurements of habitat
youth. We spent a total of three months collecting soundscapes
and we'll be continuing this work to understand the dynamics
of degradation as fires continue to rage across this landscape.