13 Eddie Game: Ecoacoustics

[00:00:08] I'm Catherine Polcz and this is Plant Kingdom.

[00:00:11] I'm recording in Sydney on the lens of the Gadigal People of the E-R-Nation

[00:00:15] and I pair respect to their elders, past, present, and future.

[00:00:20] Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about the sublime in nature

[00:00:23] and environment featuring scientists, artists, researchers, and writers.

[00:00:28] We discuss their work, stories, and reflections from the field.

[00:00:32] Today's conversation is with Dr. Eddie Game.

[00:00:35] Eddie is the lead scientist and director of conservation

[00:00:38] for the Nature Conservancies Asia Pacific Region.

[00:00:42] In our conversation, Eddie discusses conservation as a collaboration with community

[00:00:47] and his pioneering works into acoustic ecology, which is the study of the biology of nature's landscapes.

[00:00:55] He shares his fieldwork in Papua New Guinea in Borneo

[00:00:58] and what it's like withing up to the calls of Gibbons. Here's our conversation.

[00:01:12] Well, thank you so much Eddie really looking forward to chatting today.

[00:01:17] In your career, you've been lucky to work in so many different parts of the world

[00:01:21] and rainforests in the Antarctic sub-Antarctic Marine Islands in Australia

[00:01:27] in marine environments, terrestrial systems.

[00:01:29] And I'm looking forward to discussing some of these with you.

[00:01:33] But I guess to start us off, can you just introduce yourself

[00:01:36] and what your role at the Nature Conservancy is?

[00:01:39] You bet. And it is a little bit of chat, Catherine. Thanks for taking the time.

[00:01:44] My name is Dr. Eddie Game and I'm the lead scientist and director of conservation

[00:01:48] for the Nature Conservancy in the Asia Pacific Region

[00:01:51] which in the Nature Conservancy's parlance is the big sprawling region that goes from Mongolia

[00:01:57] sort of all the way down to New Zealand in the south and the Pacific Islands across the India

[00:02:02] and in the west of fast region but a super important one for global biodiversity.

[00:02:07] My role is to make sure that we're doing the most impactful things we can for the environment

[00:02:12] in those places pursue our mission with the best available science.

[00:02:18] You're quite hands-on in this role too, you're doing a lot of field work yourself.

[00:02:24] What are some of the major conservation or biodiversity issues that you're working on in the Asia Pacific?

[00:02:32] As you can imagine, Catherine is a huge number of pressures facing the environment.

[00:02:37] The Asia Pacific is such a populace region.

[00:02:41] So much of the world's population here and the pressure on ecosystems is enormous

[00:02:44] and so a lot of what we work on across the region is places we have that pressure on the ecosystem

[00:02:50] and we're trying to find a way to navigate that so that people can thrive

[00:02:55] but it doesn't just come at the expense of the environment

[00:02:58] and if I can think about some of the major themes that cross notable geographies we work

[00:03:03] in because every country we work and have sort of a unique take on conservation

[00:03:08] and unique set of issues and we have to be responsive to that but there are some general themes.

[00:03:13] Asia Pacific region has some really global, significant rain forests, particularly at those

[00:03:19] like Indonesia and up in New Guinea and many of those rain forests also people sort of wealth

[00:03:25] and so there's a lot of pressure to exploit those rain forests somehow

[00:03:29] and so we're working in both of those places on alternatives to clearing rain forest

[00:03:35] ways that people can make a livelihood or increase their own well being

[00:03:40] while still keeping rain forest and because the whole globe benefits so much from having those rain forests

[00:03:45] they're not just because they're extraordinary biodiversity but also because of the role they play

[00:03:50] for their global climate.

[00:03:51] Looking on a lot of people probably don't know this but Asia Pacific also has huge areas of grassland

[00:03:57] as they are the largest temperate remaining temperate grasslands in the world in Mongolia

[00:04:02] in China and actually the largest sort of continuous intact so Van out of tropical

[00:04:07] grasslands across northern Australia and interesting even though they're very different systems

[00:04:12] in Mongolia and northern Australia they have some things in common and one of the common things

[00:04:17] that they've been heavily exploited as a place to grey animals cattle particularly

[00:04:23] and so you have a situation where a lot of grasslands are sort of over exploited

[00:04:29] and that's changed the natural dynamics, it's changed the way that fire works

[00:04:33] and those lands go, it's changed the types of plants that are there and so we have a program across

[00:04:38] really large areas looking at how we can more sustainably manage grasslands

[00:04:44] and then if I think across to the marines both Asia Pacific are some incredible marines

[00:04:50] but certainly the most biodiversity of earth oceans and our planet are found in the Asia Pacific region

[00:04:56] it's like eastern Far East and in the Nigerian in coral reef areas which makes you consider

[00:05:02] sort of right smack bang in the middle of the Asia Pacific here at this big region called the coral triangle

[00:05:07] which really covers some of the great coral reef ecosystems over the world

[00:05:11] we work here a lot on over exploitation and how we manage that there's so many people

[00:05:16] in so much pressure on this coral reef and coral reef particularly sensitive

[00:05:20] them and their species to over exploitation

[00:05:23] good news is when they manage well they can also be really resilient

[00:05:28] and so we're often working on how we have a combination of managing local pressures

[00:05:34] whether it comes from fishing or express sediment coming from coastal land clearing

[00:05:39] and then local stewardship of those these reefs to make sure that they manage in a way

[00:05:44] that still allow people to derive benefits

[00:05:48] they say we do some one of the kind of interesting thing in the marines space

[00:05:53] but not everyone will be familiar with something that I'm particularly excited about

[00:05:58] in many of the areas in the world there would have been another kind of reef

[00:06:03] particularly in temperate areas so slightly cooler marineries there were resmede out of shellfish oysters

[00:06:08] and mussels and hugely important for ecosystems both because of the role they play

[00:06:14] in cleaning the water filter in the water giving a really nice providing nice water

[00:06:19] health and clarity but I'll see providing habitat for loads of animals

[00:06:22] and so productivity of areas was really helped by them those shellfish reefs

[00:06:26] and many parts of the world have been completely removed because they were sources of food

[00:06:33] they were navigational hazards the limestone in them could be used for other purposes

[00:06:38] the countries like Australia lost nearly all of its shellfish reefs which would have run

[00:06:44] from Brisbane right away around to Perth maybe in a little bit further north in both cases

[00:06:49] and we're beginning this slow process of rebuilding those last shellfish reef habitats

[00:06:55] and also doing that in places like Hong Kong

[00:06:58] I guess you can see has so many of the solutions kind of applied in one place

[00:07:04] might be really interesting in a different context so there must be so much knowledge exchange between each project

[00:07:10] yeah the shellfish reefs are so interesting I remember when I first hearing about that a few years ago

[00:07:17] and it challenged my idea what I thought it over was

[00:07:20] and would that be part of the great southern reef?

[00:07:23] Exactly yeah we've been flying like that term.

[00:07:27] Yeah beautiful.

[00:07:28] Yeah definitely the great barrier for good reasons get a huge amount of attention

[00:07:33] but I'm hopeful over time that people will start to imagine the southern shellfish reefs of Australia

[00:07:39] sort of strung together as this super important happen

[00:07:42] and it's fascinating to you know really interesting ecosystems to dive on

[00:07:46] also for in the Australian context right around where people are similar to New Zealand

[00:07:52] we've been helping to restore muscle-based reefs and Uttaro in New Zealand

[00:07:55] also you know right in places where people exist

[00:07:59] and so that's something nice a lot of our work tends to take place in fairly remote ecosystems

[00:08:05] but shellfish reefs are right on people's doorstep.

[00:08:09] Yeah and so interesting to think about the importance of naming them

[00:08:14] and sharing stories of these different habitats to make them come alive

[00:08:19] there's the really iconic ones like the Great Barrier Reef or the Bordeaux rainforest

[00:08:25] and then yeah being able to tell the stories about the grasslands

[00:08:29] and the shellfish reefs that were not as familiar with such an important part of

[00:08:33] conserving them isn't it?

[00:08:35] Absolutely.

[00:08:36] The name starts to resonate.

[00:08:38] I don't know how the great southern reef does take on but we you know we've had really good success

[00:08:42] also just raising people's awareness about those shellfish reefs as like homecombed

[00:08:47] for instance where you'll connection to seafood and seafood farming

[00:08:52] and bringing that kind of nexus together where you realise that oh you know actually

[00:08:56] this way is everyone can kind of win out of rebearing things like shellfish reefs

[00:09:01] because not only are you restoring this habitat helping clean water

[00:09:06] engaging aquaculture industries but you're creating a resilience against a lot of coastal impacts

[00:09:11] to having those hard nature-based ecosystems along the coast.

[00:09:16] Yeah I'd like to go back to a different marine environment with you and your background

[00:09:22] is in fisheries research and marine science is that right?

[00:09:28] That's right.

[00:09:29] Yeah I started out as a marine boiler just like I guess like so many kids that just love

[00:09:32] being in the ocean that's the area that I want to do.

[00:09:35] And you had the chance for you doing some field work or research on kind of the

[00:09:40] sea.

[00:09:41] Is it heard island one of the sub and Arctic islands?

[00:09:45] That's right yeah that's a Australian sub-intacting territory.

[00:09:49] And what was what was that kind of experience like for you what was really what kind of

[00:09:54] struck you about seeing that island and and the ecosystem there.

[00:10:00] Oh goodness that's it that was right the start of my career and it wasn't in one level

[00:10:04] of a kind of an incredible adventure and really eye-opening.

[00:10:07] For those who don't know it, I've heard in McDonald's Island are Australian territories

[00:10:13] that sort of you know two thirds of the way to Antarctica from the bottom of Australia

[00:10:18] takes a long time to get there and it's a wild place.

[00:10:21] It's a terrible terrible weather, big seas and freezing coal but some amazing wildlife

[00:10:26] and also it turns out some really good fishing particularly for this one species

[00:10:30] Patagonian toothbrush and that's what I was down there studying working on kind of sustainability

[00:10:35] and measurement around the Patagonian toothbrush fishery and it was that experience

[00:10:41] that really sort of sent me on this conservation path because I've been working in fisheries

[00:10:46] quite a lot and you know that's where I thought if you're a marine biologist and you want to work

[00:10:53] and apply sense of it's a really practical sense rather than a few research sense fisheries

[00:10:58] because the way to do it and then on one of the trips down there we got to do some kind of experimental

[00:11:04] fishing we were doing a test to see what things were like inside the marine protected area

[00:11:08] that had been established around Hed Island.

[00:11:11] We were so eye-opening that the fish we caught were larger and more abundant and only different species

[00:11:18] and we were bringing up incredible things from the deep there.

[00:11:22] I thought wow you know just outside this marine protected area the environment is so different

[00:11:27] we've given it such a hiding and this place is really really hard to get to you

[00:11:31] it's not like anybody is going down there unless you're going to be vessel when you're commercially fishing

[00:11:36] and this thought at that moment. If we're really we've really sort of done some damage to this remote part of the planet

[00:11:43] and this marine protected area around it is doing something quite significant for these ecosystems and species

[00:11:50] that are otherwise less that's what I want to be involved in.

[00:11:55] Yeah, wow, it sounds really special to see that and I guess introduce possibilities of how things could look, how fisheries could look

[00:12:05] and conservation I wanted to just kind of unpack that a little bit it's a term we use.

[00:12:11] Every day of course it can mean a lot of different methods or different outcomes, different kind of paradigms

[00:12:19] about how people might think about conservation. I guess for you in your work can you just talk a little bit about what

[00:12:26] conservation means or looks like for you?

[00:12:31] Yeah, and you're right, can't do it does that term does mean a lot of different things to different people

[00:12:35] I think that's okay. For me and for the nature Conservancy we really interpret conservation as protecting the lands and waters upon which life depends

[00:12:46] and as an organisation we've always really taken an ecosystem approach to that.

[00:12:52] So many cases in conservation you'll hear about people working on particular species, whereas we've always looked at ecosystems

[00:12:59] as a fundamental building blocks of biodiversity so all the species we have on the planet ultimately depend on ecosystems

[00:13:06] and the diversity of ecosystems so conservation for us really means that we want all of the natural ecosystems that should be on the planet to still be here

[00:13:16] and still be functioning. And these days that really means functioning in a system that does have people as well.

[00:13:25] There's no doubt that the conservation is a really kind of a people focused activity in some way.

[00:13:31] But there is no conservation without people and we're also really explicit that we're doing conservation for nature but also for people.

[00:13:42] Yeah, yeah you spoke about it to me before as a sociological practice and that engagement with community is really fundamental and so much of your work

[00:13:55] has working with communities kind of changed what you may have thought a good conservation outcome was or is

[00:14:03] Yeah, it's a great question. It certainly has changed what I think of the importance skills to be successful conservation

[00:14:10] when you go through it at university. If I'm really not standing in college that'll be what I mean

[00:14:17] Yeah, everyone just needs to see what I see. Yeah, yeah and that's not the case at all because you're right. You're a sociological enterprise and all the conservation happening in is intertwined

[00:14:31] sociological systems and one of the things that has completely evident to me now from years of work and I think is really embedded

[00:14:38] in the way that nature can sermency approaches its work is that it has to be, it has to be working in a way that's supportive of local communities,

[00:14:46] local communities of the ones or in the other in many ways depend on ecosystems the most better. Also the viewers of them there, the ones interacting with them

[00:14:56] and as I mentioned in many cases this is there the main source of wealth and certainly could be also unethical to ask people to make a trade off between

[00:15:07] improving their well-being, like our community's improving their well-being and conserving nature. That means that you're really always looking for solutions

[00:15:16] that kind of reinforce people's aspirations and that's where that's certainly where the magic happens when you're doing something that's aligned with what

[00:15:26] local communities really want to do. And then you're providing alternatives because in many cases, not always been many cases

[00:15:32] people are really motivated to live in a healthy environment and keep on using environments really sustainably.

[00:15:40] It's always been part of your interest too isn't it? Part of your PhD was also in decision-making science, kind of about how people value or make decisions about

[00:15:51] conservation is what's not right.

[00:15:53] Yeah, that's right. I mean, the HD was in decisions that were just done at getting back to my earlier point about ecology maybe.

[00:15:59] I'll be in a critical thing, I think the decision science, but I drove was I'm like training with the leases important there's

[00:16:04] and you kind of a ecology because yeah, you get work a lot on both how you can make good decisions, but also why we struggle to make good decisions

[00:16:14] what are all the common biases and cognitive challenges that people everywhere.

[00:16:19] No matter where you're from, no matter how educated you are face when making decisions about the environment.

[00:16:25] So a lot of the way decision science translates into an applied help in the field is saying, okay, like knowing that there we have these cognitive biases, knowing that there are these traps out there.

[00:16:39] How can we help guide decisions or structured decisions of providing information at the right kind of moment to help us avoid some of those.

[00:16:49] And incorporating the more you can get into a dialogue about what people care about, about what they're underlying values are that the better you can find workable solutions and so often often what we're sort of driving out when we're in conversations with not just with communities but with companies and governments too.

[00:17:15] And I say, why I like something this way and we try to send a quote what is what's underlying that what's the real value or motivation that's causing you to like it that way because then helps us understand what how and how other kind of alternatives might compare to that.

[00:17:34] And I wanted to ask you about a really fascinating area that you work on and it's developing the odds that you're really involved with in your conservation work.

[00:17:46] Tell us, Eddie, what is acoustic ecology?

[00:17:50] The acoustic ecology is essentially listening to the sounds of nature and using those signals to tell us something about those ecosystems.

[00:17:59] What I'm particularly fascinated is how sound in nature can really tell us about the health of those ecosystems and that impacts the very easy back.

[00:18:08] So we're having both good and bad on those ecosystems.

[00:18:12] I guess it feels new but something like scientists they've been recording sound for decades right like birds surveys.

[00:18:23] Back surveys.

[00:18:27] Marine whale sound.

[00:18:32] What's kind of the the history of this field?

[00:18:36] The use of sound itself is really old in ecology because it's especially for species that are hard to see or survey another way it was a great way to work out who was there and so.

[00:18:49] Particularly good applications are things like whales or citations that we can drop down a microphone in the water called a hydrophone.

[00:18:57] And hearing the whales you can work out from how many whales there something about their behavior because so much of their life happened to out of sight actually the same with that too.

[00:19:08] You know that's a fly around at night they have to see when you can you can catch them sometimes but then you're really limited what you can observe so from for many decades that surveys have been done by using microphones very microphones.

[00:19:22] I can capture very high frequency sounds that that's made and certainly name so there has been a long history of people using it but that always being focused on individual species.

[00:19:32] Okay, this is the sound that a species makes and we're going to listen for that species and the really exciting advanced I think has happened to know the last couple of decades maybe just the last 15 years or so is really the expansion of that use of sound to look at whole ecosystems.

[00:19:49] So we can not only do a lot more individual species stuff as a computing power increases but we can also look at kind of sound and it's totally and that's one thing that really fascinates me so how all the sound that happens in an environment called the sounds go.

[00:20:06] What information is encoded in that and that the sort of history of that as a discipline is is newer because it took it.

[00:20:15] It took advances in computing power for us to be able to process the kind of amount of information that's contained in an audio recording of the whole soundscape and also I think the other thing it's important to note is the cost of the units we used record has come down a lot so if you were back in couple of decades it was really expensive to have a.

[00:20:36] High quality piece of recording equipment you could take out on the forest or into you know into environments and so that meant their researchers tended to have a very small number of them.

[00:20:45] So you really limited in the sorts of studies you can do if you've only got a handful of recording in us, but as the cost of that hardware came down people were able to go into the field with much larger numbers and that meant they were able to get a much more extensive ecosystem picture of what's happening acoustically and then the advances in in computing.

[00:21:07] So we had these lovely piece of both of those things coming together and enabling us to take information from soundscapes and that's been really the major focuses of our use of acoustic ecology.

[00:21:21] It makes me think a bit about environmental DNA sampling too how that's just changed so much how you can amplify a little bit of soil or water and then see all the different kinds of organisms that are.

[00:21:36] have come into contact or shed their DNA somewhere in that sample which I guess picks up some of the more rare signals of creatures that might be harder to capture their information.

[00:21:48] I think that's like a definitely kind of an even newer frontier.

[00:21:53] I often compare it to when we really started getting a handle on satellite information to really sort of a walk only in the 90s and then sort of early 2000s when satellite information started becoming really widely and freely available.

[00:22:08] And then the insights they were able to get about the environment as a result of that were extraordinary.

[00:22:15] I think acoustic ecologies becoming a bit like that sort of a critical form of earth observation can be really widely applied and maybe at some point it'll end up a bit like satellite information that's heavily aggregated on people can access large data sets and do a lot of meta analysis on them.

[00:22:34] And I guess you've touched a little bit on this but what kind of information about an environment is captured by acoustics.

[00:22:44] In addition to the kind of individual species that are making a sound there what we tend to focus on is whether you have kind of a whole collection of organisms and that they're behaving like you would expect them to behave in a healthy environment.

[00:23:00] So to give you a very real example we've done a lot of recording in really intact rainforest and that gives us a sense of exactly what a sound scape should sound like in a really intact rainforest and then we can use that as a baseline to compare the other cases where we might have done, who would be using that rainforest either where we're doing some logging and chopping things down or hunting or clearing parts of it.

[00:23:24] So what sort of impact is this having what the soundscape let's us do is give us kind of a measure of the total impact on biodiversity which is a really hard thing to see from from individual species count and turn that into much more sensitive than what is contained in individual species information.

[00:23:42] Because in the soundscape you're hearing lots of insects you're hearing birds you're hearing amphibians you're hearing mammals and you're hearing importantly you're hearing them all in the way that they're in nature in the absence of the person observing and say as a researcher or anybody who's collecting information you go into a place like a rainforest your presence their changes that community and we'll see the things that they're doing are slightly modified so even if you're listening or trying to

[00:24:12] to know you've already changed the environment somehow it's so interesting yeah like when we walk in the woods and hear birds calling we think so beautiful but really it's saying like over here go away.

[00:24:26] Yeah.

[00:24:28] Following you yeah.

[00:24:31] And I wanted to ask it capture so much interesting behavioral information too and kind of the circadian daily rhythm of places can you talk a little bit about the dawn chorus and dusk chorus.

[00:24:47] Yeah and then these are the moments of the day where kind of the most of the most useful and the most acoustic information is there so.

[00:24:56] People that have got up early and been in environments we familiar with this but as this this moment right at the start of the day called a dawn chorus and you have both sort of a really peak of many animals acoustic activity but you also have an overlap of acoustic activity because you're still getting acoustic activity for many.

[00:25:15] Not turn along night time species and you're getting acoustic activity for many of the daytime species and they overlap for this moment and it's also a moment of sort of high activity for many species and that culminates with this.

[00:25:28] The dawn chorus which in every healthy environment that we have surveyed is by far the sort of highest peak of acoustic activity and in many ways kind of dominates the acoustic sense of the emergence of a you know a line of acoustic activity throughout the day you get this.

[00:25:45] Huge peak right at sunrise and then it goes down to something fairly quiet for most of the day and then you get a similar peak usually not quite as high but in the evening just as dusk is falling.

[00:25:57] So when did winded by acoustic's become part of your your work what was the first project you were able to apply or experiment with this field.

[00:26:07] The first project we we released by acoustic's almost actually in the rainforest of Pappinucini which is probably a fairly intense place to do your first acoustic work.

[00:26:16] We also was solving a problem we had which is doing a rainforest conservation work with communities in a remote mountain range and the north part of Pappinucini the Aidal Burton mountain range.

[00:26:27] It was really hard to survey nature there just because it was so remote the so many species that are not well characterized.

[00:26:36] It would not be known to local people but not not not well surveyed scientifically and it would be incredibly expensive to get their own work there and hard to find.

[00:26:46] Experts and so we were looking for ways that we could figure out if these community conservation areas that we had helped with a stat list.

[00:26:54] We're actually conserving the biodiversity of those forests because Pappinucini has an interesting system of community 10 year where the communities have full rights over there their forests as they are far as they manage them and what we have been working on with how we sort of spatially arrange the thing the activities they do so they have one area that would be for their gardening and one area.

[00:27:16] If I'm thinking then they would try out a conservation area and we would support them with range of activities not to do that but you need to be evidence that it's working especially if you want to extend that kind of strategy.

[00:27:26] So that was where we first applied acoustic and deep in the genitals of PNGN.

[00:27:34] And can you take us there and tell us a bit about what those forests of Pappinucini look like? What kinds of creatures can you find there?

[00:27:45] Yeah, very, very nice. It is an amazing part of the world and I do hope more people have the opportunity to visit the rainforests of Pappinucini but you haven't.

[00:27:56] The rainforests we were working in were on these mountains so first of all things it's really steep.

[00:28:02] It's not sort of walking across a big flat jungle but rather climbing peaks and going down and the covered in such dense forest that you can't just had to walk through it to try to find these little paths and if you're not.

[00:28:31] So that's sort of caching out of one of the great things about when you get into those rocky mountains, stream beds and the rainforests are sort of the first time you get a perspective of a view because otherwise you're just in this dense canopy that the trees around you like all rainforests got lots and lots of dense leaf sort of decomposing leaf there.

[00:28:51] There's one of the real features of rainforests that are very soft to walk through in some ways because the whole floor of the rainforest is covered in vegetation, and always have a rainforest that are really distinctive kind of smell as a result of all that decomposing matter.

[00:29:08] You hear a lot of animals in the rainforests. One of the features of them is really hard to see them because it's very dense and amazing even if you get separated from your fuel work partners, but 10 or 15 meters sometimes it's hard to see each other and say,

[00:29:24] you're hearing animals or any occasionally you'll see these particular birds sort of flip through the trees and I mean the local community where we go, there's this paradise so it's this pigeon or something about the time that pointed out.

[00:29:41] What does it sound like? What does a healthy jungle sound like?

[00:29:48] Healthy forests are noisy forests. They're so loud I think it's one of the things that just come on this shocks people when they go to a healthy forest.

[00:29:55] We're not used to environments being so naturally noisy but more in a really healthy rainforest especially when one of those periods that I was talking about earlier in the morning,

[00:30:07] it's just so much so much constant noise from insects all around you. There's birds call them, I mean it's hard to stop with here many of the sounds because you just have so much noise.

[00:30:20] It's quite lovely seeing two to see if you do kind of stop to take, you know, good stuff to see it not as just a bank of noise but here are the individual pieces and you know,

[00:30:35] it's hard to say I don't know, they can just even be on your mobile phone and listen to it at a later time especially somewhere, somewhere safe and calm when you kind of pair of headphones on.

[00:30:46] You actually hear a lot more when you're in the forests, most of us are pretty kind of unnatural in front of it to be and then we're always a bit on guard even if we don't know it or eyes doing a lot of sound filtering for us.

[00:31:01] A lot of the time, all right, the same well, you know, what's one of the sounds you should be paying attention to?

[00:31:07] And I guess that's some of the new information that the field is giving you, right? One thing that I thought was so interesting too is that acoustic ecology is also driving new ecological theory, right?

[00:31:27] And I wanted to ask you a bit about the acoustic niche hypothesis and what this is and what are kind of your thoughts on it.

[00:31:37] Yeah, the acoustic niche hypothesis is sort of lovely, lovely hypothesis in some ways is developing our guck or burning crosses one of their own pioneers of acoustic ecology as we currently think about it in essence,

[00:31:50] and it's a clean test, you know, the rainforests or any environmental really busy acoustic space. And so imagine if you're in a really busy restaurant that's often hard to hear each other over the conversation,

[00:32:02] that's because all of us are speaking at roughly the same frequency and the same thing could happen in nature where everyone's speaking at the same frequency, it's hard to communicate it here in Japan, so it makes sense to separate the frequencies, but which we're communicating with each other.

[00:32:17] In nature like you hear, I'm really wide set of frequency bands, but typically we're looking at things that are going from 20Hz up to 20kHz, so 20kHz and the higher end of that range is mostly insects, the lower end might be amphibians, mammals and birds.

[00:32:38] One of the reasons why we're good at listening to birds, because birds really overlap with where we're hearing is the best, so people are actually communicating very often at similar frequencies.

[00:32:48] Yeah, that acoustic niche hypothesis is essentially this, all these different acoustic niches, animals, they're involved to fill them.

[00:32:54] Not sure there's that much support for that as our hypothesis, when we test it, it can be difficult to prove, but I think in some ways that doesn't matter so much because the way it transpires is actually somewhat similar.

[00:33:12] Animals communicate at very different frequencies, and they do tend to fill the frequency spectrum, and I suspect that's mostly because animals are more for logically different, they're shaped different, they're big animals as well, and it was here animals that makes out with different kinds of parts of their bodies.

[00:33:28] All of that natural diversity and the way animals are in the way that they communicate drives a lot of diversity in acoustic expression, and so even if they haven't evolved explicitly to fill in acoustic niche, they do have different acoustic niches and we exploit that in our research by working out something called the sort of saturation of the environment.

[00:33:52] Essentially how many of those acoustic bands are filled, well we do see that in really healthy environments.

[00:33:59] You have most of those acoustic bands filled up with something say any moment in time and the environment is there something calling in that frequency communicating at that frequency and healthy basis.

[00:34:10] Many of those metadose are filled up in them as we degrade environment, we tell us to see gaps opening up in that sea, you get a lot less of the acoustic space being saturated.

[00:34:22] It's so interesting to think about the acoustic sphere as another space or medium, or not a limited resource but you don't want to all be calling at the same frequency or at the same time.

[00:34:36] It's such a different, introduce this such a different way to think about space in the forest and communication, which means everything.

[00:34:46] Yeah, and it makes sense such an important form of communication.

[00:34:50] Actually in places like forests where animals can't visually see each other easily or certainly not initially and they're likely to get closer to each other before they can visually see each other.

[00:35:01] Yeah, and in such a loud place like a rainforest there must be some really piercing and loud calls that you have to develop to get through.

[00:35:11] Oh my god, and it can really can be specially in such, especially cicadas they can be really really really definitely enough.

[00:35:20] Yeah, it's one of the nice things about looking at the whole sounds get those because you might have a flocker particular birds that hang out near your microphone and then make a terrible racket.

[00:35:30] But they're also at a single frequency set or a small number of frequencies.

[00:35:35] So when you listen to the recording like, oh my god, I don't like it here are these parats but when you translate that sort of raw sound data into numbers we turn it into a big spreadsheet of data.

[00:35:50] You can start to see, okay, well even though they're really noisy there are only in this one frequency bands so you can actually hear all the other things that are behind.

[00:35:58] Yeah, and how each plot that you recorded is probably so different to, is it what was the kind of variation between?

[00:36:10] That's a great question because that was sort of the secret to that maybe more than the biggest insights we got when we were in a different place in Borneo where we were looking exactly that.

[00:36:24] You know if we put out a lot of microphones how different is the sound in different places and while we were getting out there is something that's called beta diversity.

[00:36:35] So, alpha diversity is the number of species that you have in any one location and you can be to diversity is how different.

[00:36:43] The number how different are the species compositions between two locations and what we learn is that if you really.

[00:36:50] Healthy intact forest so one that hasn't particularly one that hasn't been logged before.

[00:36:56] If you put out microphones, say like I imagine it's sort of just a spread of the memory kilometer every microphone sounds what he is incredibly different to each other so the sound scope is rich but also full of slightly different species and they're all very, all very distinct whereas you go to.

[00:37:12] A forest that's been heavily logged and actually in many cases you still have a huge number of species.

[00:37:19] So the sort of total soundscape still looks very high but one is that each microphone here is roughly the same thing so you're actually getting really similar species compositions in locations and that means over.

[00:37:32] I'm really actually having fewer species because you have the same ones in each location where it's already, you know, unlawned for us.

[00:37:39] Do you have different species in each location?

[00:37:43] And I wanted to ask you a bit more about Borneo too.

[00:37:46] I emailed you last week and got the amazing auto reply that hi, I'm in the forest of Borneo this week with limited connectivity and it's a place you go quite a bit with your work.

[00:37:58] You just tell me a bit more about biochistic work there and what are you, what's kind of the context for that research.

[00:38:07] Yeah, fascinating. Thanks.

[00:38:09] The Borneo is such an important place on this planet.

[00:38:14] So oldest rainforest in the world and has maybe more plant species there than anywhere else in the world.

[00:38:19] The oldest rainforest in the world.

[00:38:22] Yeah, yeah, Borneo is a very old island.

[00:38:25] So very, I met a party while the species deploy so many different species in those rainforests.

[00:38:30] Incredibly tall trees for tropical rainforests as well.

[00:38:35] So really important, but also a place that lost a lot of rainforests and this is going to sound somewhere, always said a bit strange coming from a conservationist.

[00:38:43] And I know it's finding myself there working on forestry and logging a lot.

[00:38:48] One of the biggest problems facing Borneo at the moment is that the logging industry is really struggling and financially.

[00:38:56] It's not particularly profitable and superficially that sounds like a great thing for conservation, but when you dig a little deeper you realise it's not because the forestry industry does something in an issue called selective harvesting.

[00:39:10] So you don't clear fill the whole forest. You just take trees here and there and does some damage to the forest and to the biodiversity as I mentioned, but the alternative is usually clearing the forest entirely.

[00:39:22] As forestry becomes less and less profitable, there's more and more pressure to clear the forest.

[00:39:29] And then that may be legal conversion.

[00:39:31] People say, the government is saying, okay now this forest we're going to turn it into oil palm. We're going to turn it into a plantation of a casher to make paper or it could be in the east that just need land.

[00:39:43] You have growing populations. You have people moving around. They need places to farm and if you don't have an active sort of forestry industry that forest land is sort of seen as upper grabs.

[00:39:55] If you like places that we work, we started to realise that the biggest loss of forest was actually just in illegal encroachment on areas that were forestry concessions. So areas allocated for logging that weren't being logged.

[00:40:09] So you have the quite incredible situation where there was less forest last on active logging concessions than there were on those that weren't being logged.

[00:40:21] And so the nature Conservancy started trying to buy in active logging concessions and see if we can manage them for conservation.

[00:40:29] So we take it a logging company. We've set aside part of it for biodiversity conservation and then we're working on sustainable sort of improving the sustainability of logging practices on the other part of us.

[00:40:44] So never thought my career as a conservation we come around to kind of looking at the details of logging, but that's the thing that we're finding to be perhaps the most effective forest conservation work that we've done in the Asia.

[00:40:58] You spoke a bit about how loud a healthy forest is do wild places sound differently than they did before are we getting quieter in nature.

[00:41:15] Unfortunately, from all of the acoustic work that we've done right across the Asia Pacific that the one sort of overarching common theme is that environment targeting quiet.

[00:41:29] So which sounds strange for people. I would say, I heard there's so much sort of human noise and they're right there is a lot of human noise and some places are getting noise here in that regard but overall nature and natural environments that we are becoming quieter places and it's particularly pronounced at that dawn.

[00:41:46] It's a core sort of the great silencing of dawn across the Asia Pacific and I suspect it's true in other places as well and it's quite sad.

[00:41:56] And I hope that we're able to reverse that trend some extent because something pretty magical about that kind of just the noise of nature when it's in its for orchestra in the morning.

[00:42:08] Yeah, if we lose the species we lose it sound. It makes me think a little bit about to that iconic David Attenborough moment years ago when they recorded the Liar Bird calling do have you seen that clip before?

[00:42:23] I think so. It's just, it's, I think it's in South Australia and it just starts about the complexity of its song and how it can mimic everything in the forest and then it kind of devolves into clicking camera sounds and then it starts making chainsaw sounds.

[00:42:43] And it was just so powerful to put you into the experience of the animals that are seeing this change to and I guess trying to make sense of it.

[00:42:54] Yeah, that's a lovely, very clever way to share that.

[00:42:58] Amazing birds too aren't they?

[00:43:00] I think something that's also just so interesting and powerful to think about acoustics, you know kind of like smells acoustics sounds music.

[00:43:11] It's very emotive for us and it's really powerful how different places the sounds of them can take you back there really easily too in a really powerful way.

[00:43:23] And I wanted to ask, were there any particular sounds for you that you miss when you're traveling abroad or that really connect you to two place?

[00:43:35] It's a lovely question. There's a really iconic sound that I just love and it's hearing gibbon in the morning in the forest of Borneo.

[00:43:49] But those who have been lucky enough to wake up in the rainforests, gibbons, waking up in the rainforest. It's a lovely moment at any time but then if you're in a nice healthy forest you hear these gibbons calling them and given to really vocal animals actually the true ape this morning.

[00:44:06] These true ape seem to have been most of their time in trees they're very rarely come down and they live in family groups for they call to each other and they're very distinctive.

[00:44:16] We call them you hear it from a long way away and it's sort of a sound that really encapsulates what we're trying to achieve with keeping healthy ecosystems that have those beautiful sounds of nature still in them.

[00:45:09] That was my conversation with Dr. Eddie Game. Thank you for listening and thank you to Eddie for sharing his work.

[00:45:16] Plank Kingdom is hosted and produced by me, Katherine Polz, our music is by Carl Dider.

[00:45:23] Listen to us for ever get your podcasts and check out our website at Plank Kingdom.org.