We congratulate Eve Treadaway for winning this year's Biosciences Prize. This is our annual student bursary, awarded in memory of past member Ursula
Henriques, for the best second-year fieldwork project in the Biosciences faculty at Cardiff University.
She will receive the award at the Cardiff Naturalists' Society meeting on Monday 27 March, when she will also give a presentation of her work entitled "The biological and environmental
factors that govern the ‘soundtrack’ of the secondary lowland tropical
rainforest surrounding Danau Girang Field Centre", or, for short, 'Project Noise'.
Eve Treadaway writes:
Project Noise set out to develop a new approach to
rainforest bioacoustics, using the extensively described botanic plots of Danau
Girang Field Centre, Sabah, Borneo as recording sites. Instead of
training bioacoustic work on a particular species or taxonomic group, as is
standard practice, this project attempted to record and analyse the bioacoustic
product of the ecosystem as a whole, termed here ‘ambient rainforest sound’ (ARS).
There are numerous interrelated factors that, summed
together, result in observed ARS. These can be broadly divided into two groups;
biological (i.e. the animal species present at a site) and environmental (i.e.
weather, botanic diversity*, time). The aim was to investigate potential
relationships both between factors of different groups and of factors within
the same group.
Project Noise was a small first step on the road toward
assessing rainforest ecosystem biodiversity and functioning, simply by
‘listening’ to the sound produced. The findings were promising, and more
extensive application of the methods employed would enable more powerful
statistical analysis and preliminary algorithm design (estimating
functioning/biodiversity from acoustic data).
I look forward to sharing Project Noise with the Cardiff
Naturalists Society on the 27th of March 2017.