Free-ranging livestock grazing shifts the acoustic community in a Northeast Asian temperate forest

Understanding livestock‒wildlife interactions, especially in forest ecosystems, is critical for biodiversity conservation and sustainable land management. However, the long-term and cascading impacts of livestock grazing on forest structure and community bioacoustics are important yet largely neglected areas of research. Here, we used acoustic indices and a sound event detection (SED) model to evaluate the effects of continuous cattle grazing on seasonal soundscapes in Northeast China. We collected and analyzed over 18,785 h of recordings from 10 cattle-grazed forest plots and 10 ungrazed forest plots in Northeast China. We identified sound events in each recording via deep learning and calculated six acoustic indices, as well as extracted vegetation characteristics using LiDAR point cloud data. Our results revealed that grazing activities significantly changed seasonal soundscape dynamics, with biophony being highest in grazed forests and lowest in ungrazed forests in winter. Livestock..., , # Data from: Free-ranging livestock grazing shifts the acoustic community in a Northeast Asian temperate forest

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.0zpc867cg](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.0zpc867cg)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset was collected as part of a year-long (July 2022–July 2023) ecological study conducted in the Northeast Tiger and Leopard National Park, China. The research aimed to evaluate the impacts of free-ranging cattle grazing on temperate forest soundscapes and vegetation structure. We employed a comparative experimental design across 10 grazed and 10 ungrazed forest plots, integrating passive acoustic monitoring with high-resolution LiDAR scanning.

### Files and variables

#### File: **Acoustic_indices.csv**

**Description:** Values of six traditional acoustic indices (ACI, BIO, ADI, AEI, H, NDSI) calculated for all 5-minute recordings, along with their principal component scores (PC1, PC2).

##### Variables

* Line: Forest type or treatment ca..., ,