Workshop on Joint Monitoring of Asian Terrestrial Soundscape

Recent studies have shown that long-term monitoring of soundscape across sites, countries, regions, and the globe is crucial for studying the changes in environment and biodiversity across scales. Sound can be visualized by a spectrogram with frequencies and amplitudes of sound sources along time axis. Various information (acoustic diversity) indices can be extracted to characterize / quantify the spatial-temporal variation of soundscape across scales. However, any long-term monitoring program without sound data management plan and stable support of information technology, it is impossible to scale out. Ultimately, it will fail. Long-term monitoring soundscape will generate huge amount of acoustic data and associated metadata. It raises the big data challenges to persistent archiving, visualizing, analyzing, and sharing the soundscape data. An open platform based on distributed storage and computing can be a good way to solve these challenges. An open soundscape archive with web applications is also an ideal platform for collaborative research across disciplines, e.g., biodiversity, nature conservation, aesthetics, socio-economy, environmental psychology and environmental education by sharing the soundscape data and using the provided application services. In 2014, Taiwan Forestry Research Institute (TFRI) and the GRID Computing Center of Academia Sinica (ASGC) organized the first Asian soundscape workshop and initiated the Asian Soundscape Network. Since then, more than 20 TB of soundscape recordings have been collected and archived by the network with partners from Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. For further extending the Asian soundscape monitoring network, the Asia@Connect project of European Commision supports us to organize training events to expand the monitoring network by inviting more partners from ASEAN countries to deploy new acoustic sensor in each partner’s country. This project also supports ASGC to develop an open platform based on GRID infrastructure facilitating the open science of soundscape research. This workshop is part of the training event in the project to achieve the following goals: 1) Introducing the whole project to the invited partners to collaborate on expanding the network. 2) Introducing the progress on improving biodiversity monitoring through soundscape information retrieval from the network. 3) Sharing the experiences on soundscape monitoring from old partners. 4) Re-examining and revising the protocol for monitoring the terrestrial soundscape in the network. 5) Training the Biodiversity Information Management (BIM) team of ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) and old partners on deploying the new sensors in the field and archiving acoustic data to the open platform.