First look at soundscape biodiversity in tropical rainforests of the North Malaya Peninsula (Malaysia)

Abstract

During September 2016, a recording expedition was undertaken in the Peninsular Malaysian rainforest, one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet. Semi-continuous recordings (one minute recording every five minutes) were obtained using Wildlife Acoustics SM4 recorders in order to characterize soundscape biodiversity and its relation to anthrophony using the Bioacoustic Diversity (BIO) and Normalized Difference Soundscape (NDSI) indices from the soundecology package for the R statistical computing environment. The recorders were located both within the interior of Belum National Park as well as in well preserved forests on its periphery. The relationship between biophony and anthrophony was obtained at sites known as kampungs orang asli, villages belonging to aborigines of the Temiar and Jahai ethnic communities located beside the forest. These results are compared with the values of acoustic indices obtained using similar methods in Mediterranean woodlands within the Collserola Natural Park (Barcelona), Spain. The recordings obtained in Peninsular Malaysia using both the SM4 and a Zoom H4n recorder combined with an Audio-technica handheld microphone have also allowed for testing of automated detection of specific rainforest species. During this initial testing phase, we chose the great argus (Argusianus argus), a phasianid bird known locally as the Burung Kuan for automatic detection using the monitor R package for acoustic template detection using R.