Bioacoustic Baselines for Intact Forests

Forests are at the frontline of both climate and biodiversity crises: forests are fundamental to the regulation of Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and tropical forests alone harbour over half of all terrestrial species. Consequently, forests are at the centre of global efforts to both prevent extinctions of species and sequester carbon to mitigate climate change. Most carbon sequestration initiatives do not measure how effective they are in terms of biodiversity protection, largely because it is expensive, complex and often not required. Compounding this problem is the lack of reliable biodiversity baselines, against which positive changes due to conservation and negative changes due to human pressure could be measured. The Soundscape Baselines Project is a global initiative to collect and analyse bioacoustic baselines in some of the world's remaining intact forests. The baseline data are collected using a modular system of passive acoustic monitoring and ancillary data that can be expanded and integrated with other technologies. It is managed by local teams of scientists, conservation practitioners and community members. Emphasis is on the usability of data and equipment beyond the project, community engagement and building an interconnected network of scientists across forested countries, particularly historically underexplored partnerships between tropical forest countries. In this paper, we describe the initiative and share initial results to demonstrate how the project could be used for biodiversity conservation purposes in the future and outline steps towards operationalization. We also draw a list of priority areas for additional baseline locations across remaining intact forests. We discuss how bioacoustic baselines established now and in the future will become invaluable in a rapidly changing climate and the resulting unprecedented change in Earth's forests. Establishing rigorous biodiversity baselines using bioacoustics and other technologies and approaches through collaborative science is fundamental to ground biodiversity conservation in evidence, equity and transparency.