Orthosound
Using the Sounds of Grasshoppers as Biodiversity Indicators
Soundscape ecology is a potentially powerful tool to monitor the properties of ecological assemblages in the context of increasing anthropogenic stressors such as land use intensification and climate change.
The goal of this project is to relate the sound properties recorded in grassland to its biodiversity, with a special focus on the diversity of grasshoppers. Grasshoppers are excellent bioindicators with more than 100 species in Switzerland, each with a specific sound signal. Currently, only a few taxonomic experts are mandated to collect biodiversity data, which is costly and the data availability is spatially and temporally limited. An automated device which provides an identification of species in the landscape would allow to delegate the collection of data to citizen to gather a much larger amount of data continuously.
