Acoustic monitoring for tropical insect conservation

Abstract

Monitoring the species-specific sounds produced by insects could provide us with a rapid, reliable, non-invasive measure of tropical ecosystem health and biodiversity. Although acoustic biodiversity monitoring has made rapid progress over the past decade, the focus has been mostly on vertebrates, even though insects far outnumber them, and tropical soundscapes are dominated by insect sounds. Here we provide an overview of song features for the major sound-producing insect groups, identify technological milestones and describe impediments for analyzing tropical soundscapes and insect communities. We review some promising best-practices using singing insects for non-invasive acoustic profiling and tracking of diversity in rainforest ecosystems under threat. We suggest a roadmap for joint research efforts to accelerate acoustic assessments of singing insects based on re-using the wealth of existing data from Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) in combination with curated multimedia repositories and citizen science.