Abstract
The use of Ocean Sound to describe ecosystems and address ecological questions has increased remarkably during the last decades. The current capacity of recording, storing, and analyzing large amounts of data urges efforts toward developing standards and guidelines to advance underwater soundscape analyses. The development and use of metrics to summarize soundscape attributes have become widespread, but further field-testing and validation are still necessary to identify their ecological relevance resolution. We explore a combination of approaches to determine the performance of ecoacoustic indices and the recently proposed “Soundscape Code” in combination with ecological metrics (habitat and fish assemblage composition) for discrimination between coral reef microhabitats. We collected ecological and acoustic data from Lizard Island (Great Barrier Reef), where we established five transects each with five sampling stations, covering a range of microhabitats from the reef flat zone to the forereef zone, and from high live coral cover to rubble-dominated areas. Conspicuous differences were observed between the soundscapes of the live coral cover and the rubble-dominated areas, demonstrating the potential value of using soundscapes to discriminate between and monitor changes in coral reefs. [Work supported by the BHP-AIMS Australian Coral Reef Resilience Initiative.]
Published Version
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