230 research outputs found
Rural sancturey: an ecosemiotic agency to preserve human cultural heritage and biodiversity
No full textA Rural Sanctuary is defined as an area where farming activity creates habitats for a diverse assemblage of species that find a broad spectrum of resources along the season. A Rural Sanctuary is proposed as a new model of land management to protect nature inside a framework of cultural identity and agro-forestry sustainability. A Rural Sanctuary has a dual mission: to provide immaterial (amenity, sense of place, conservation of cultural heritage) and material (agricultural products) resources for people, and to guarantee living spaces to a large assemblage of species. A Rural Sanctuary represents an ecosemiotic agency in which human eco-fields and animal eco-fields interact. This reflects a model that is rooted in the Mediterranean region, where for long time people and nature have harmoniously lived in strict contact and inter-dependence. An example of a Rural Sanctuary from this region is proposed to demonstrate the amazing diversity of living beings observed on only few hectares of farmland. A Rural Sanctuary offers possibilities to educate people about a more sustainable approach to nature, and it represents a unique place to investigate animal perception. Finally, between the different approach to certify the validity of a Rural Sanctuary, sound recording is suggested as one of the less invasive methods for ecological investigation and long-term monitoring
Editorial
No full textThe launch of a journal is always an opportunity to advance scientific knowledge, because a journal consolidates ideas and facts in a field. With this in mind, Journal of Ecoacoustics (JEA) aims to open a new season of theoretical, empirical and applied studies in Ecoacoustics, a recent ecological discipline that represents the development of bioacoustics studies into the ecological realm.</jats:p
Ecoacoustics: A quantitative approach to investigate the ecological role of environmental sounds
No full textEcoacoustics is a recent ecological discipline focusing on the ecological role of sounds.
Sounds from the geophysical, biological, and anthropic environment represent important cues used
by animals to navigate, communicate, and transform unknown environments in well-known habitats.
Sounds are utilized to evaluate relevant ecological parameters adopted as proxies for biodiversity,
environmental health, and human wellbeing assessment due to the availability of autonomous audio
recorders and of quantitative metrics. Ecoacoustics is an important ecological tool to establish an
innovative biosemiotic narrative to ensure a strategic connection between nature and humanity,
to help in-situ field and remote-sensing surveys, and to develop long-term monitoring programs.
Acoustic entropy, acoustic richness, acoustic dissimilarity index, acoustic complexity indices (ACItf
and ACIft and their evenness), normalized difference soundscape index, ecoacoustic event detection
and identification routine, and their fractal structure are some of the most popular indices successfully
applied in ecoacoustics. Ecoacoustics offers great opportunities to investigate ecological complexity
across a full range of operational scales (from individual species to landscapes), but requires an
implementation of its foundations and of quantitative metrics to ameliorate its competency on
physical, biological, and anthropic sonic contexts
A Biosemiotic Perspective of the Resource Criterion: Toward a General Theory of Resources
No full textDescribing resources and their relationships with organisms seems to be a
useful approach to a ‘unified ecology’, contributing to fill the gap between natural
and human oriented processes, and opening new perspectives in dealing with
biological complexity. This Resource Criterion defines the main properties of
resources, describes the mechanisms that link them to individual species, and gives a
particular emphasis to the biosemiotic approach that allows resources to be identified
inside a heterogeneous ecological medium adopting the eco-field model. In
particular, this Criterion allows to couple matter, structured energy and information
composing the ecological systems to the biosemiotic and cognitive mechanisms
adopted by individual species to track resources, transforming neutral surroundings
into meaningful species-specific Umwelten. The expansion of the human semiotic
niche that is a relevant evolutionary process of the present time, assigns the role of
powerful and efficient agency to the Resources Criterion to evaluate the effect of
human intrusion into the natural systems with habits of key stone species, under the
challenge of a growing use of alloctonous, immaterial and symbolic resources of the
actual globalized societal models. The Resource Criterion interprets the ecological
dynamics contributing to complete the epistemology of the ecology, to open a bridge
toward economy and other societal sciences, and to contribute to formulate a
General Theory of Resources
Perspectives in ecoacoustics: A contribution to defining a discipline. Journal of Ecoacoustics
No full textEcoacoustics is a new discipline that investigates the ecological role of
sounds. Ecoacoustics is a relevant field of research related to long-term
monitoring, habitat health, biodiversity assessment, soundscape conservation
and ecosystem management. Several life traits of the species,
populations, communities, and landscapes/waterscapes may be described
by ecoacoustics. Non-invasive programmable recording devices with
on-board ecoacoustic metric calculations are efficient and powerful tools
to investigate ecological systems.
A set of processes in four [adaptive, behavioural, geographical,
ecosemiotic] domains supports and guides the development of ecoacoustics.
The first domain includes evolutionary mechanisms that join sound
typology with the physical and biological characteristics of the environment
and create frequency partitioning among species to reduce competition.
The second domain addresses interspecific signals associated with
geophysical and anthropogenic sounds that operate to shape temporary
acoustic communities and orient species to select suitable acoustic
habitats. The third domain pertains to the geography of sound, an entity
composed of three subordinate acoustic objects: sonotopes, soundtopes,
and sonotones, which are operationally delimited in a geographical
and temporal space by the distribution of the ecoacoustic events. The
ecoacoustic events allow the classification of complex configurations of
acoustic signals and represent the grain of a soundscape mosaic. The
fourth domain operates by ecosemiotic mechanisms within the species
level according to a function-specific perception of the acoustic
information facilitated by encoding processes
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