Human Contributions to Global Soundscapes Are Less Predictable Than the Acoustic Rhythms of Wildlife
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Across the world, human (anthropophonic) sounds add to sounds of biological (biophonic) and geophysical (geophonic) origin, with human contributions including both speech and technophony (sounds of technological devices). To characterize society’s contribution to the global soundscapes, we used passive acoustic recorders at 139 sites across 6 continents, sampling both urban green spaces and nearby pristine sites continuously for 3 years in a paired design. Recordings were characterized by bird species richness and by 14 complementary acoustic indices. By relating each index to seasonal, diurnal, climatic and anthropogenic factors, we show here that latitude, time of day and day of year each predict a substantial proportion of variation in key metrics of biophony—whereas anthropophony (speech and traffic) show less predictable patterns. Compared to pristine sites, the soundscape of urban green spaces is more dominated by technophony and less diverse in terms of acoustic energy across frequencies and time steps, with less instances of quiet. We conclude that the global soundscape is formed from a highly predictable rhythm in biophony, with added noise from geophony and anthropophony. At urban sites, animals experience an increasingly noisy background of sound, which poses challenges to efficient communication.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Volume 9, 2025.
Rights
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
APA Citation
Somervuo, P., Roslin, T., Fisher, B. L., Hardwick, B., Kerdraon, D., Raharinjanahary, D., Rajoelison, E. T., Lauha, P., Griem, L., Lehikoinen, P., Niittynen, P., Piirainen, E., Lumme, M., Riihikoski, V.-M., Acevedo-Charry, O., Adalsteinsson, S. A., Ahmad, M., Alcobia, S., Aldará, J., & Andrew, N. R. (2025). Human contributions to global soundscapes are less predictable than the acoustic rhythms of wildlife. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02786-5