“Ah, a little blackbird! There is a mess, there are many, let’s move on… That’s a flying insect, maybe a bee? More fast mosquito nets, more planes…” Hunched over a computer in a room in a house in the French regional natural park of Gâtinais (Essonne), Jérôme Sueur, professor-researcher at the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN), discovers sounds recorded in previous months.
The recorder is a few miles away: a small, leaf-green box, hanging from the trunk of an oak tree on private park land. The site, in the heart of the forest, is classified as a Natura 2000 area for its open heathland environments. “There is a certain emotion when hearing this, it is data displaced in time but very real. We are witnesses of something”adds Jérôme Sueur.
This ecoacoustic is at the origin of the Sonosylva project, born two years ago and supported by the museum and the French Biodiversity Office (OFB). As in Gâtinais, loggers have been installed in another 102 forests. These discreet and programmable devices were each placed in protected spaces, 1.5 meters high above a tree approximately 20 centimeters in diameter, and at least 400 meters from the edge. “We have a good representation of continental France and Corsica”specifies Ludovic Crochard, MNHN engineer and project director.
With these microphones, the objective is to inventory and monitor the biodiversity of these forest areas, both biodiversity reservoirs and carbon sinks, but also to estimate the level of noise pollution linked to human activities in these spaces, all coming from sound. . . These recordings will contribute to the creation of a reference inventory of natural heritage, housed in the museum’s music library. “We are used to talking about the landscape visually, but the landscape also has a sound dimension”explains Jérôme Sueur.
Use of artificial intelligence tools.
Acoustic monitoring began at sea during World War II, with sonars from military submarines. It gave rise to bioacoustics, which focuses on the sound behavior of animals. Jérôme Sueur is the French “father” of ecoacoustics: it was during an international conference organized at the Paris museum in 2014 that this young scientific discipline, whose objective is to record all the sounds that arise from a natural landscape to extract essential information for the monitoring and protection of biodiversity. , has been defined.
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