Data from: Spatio-temporal scaling of biodiversity in acoustic tropical bird communities

Automated analysis of acoustic communities is a rapidly emerging approach
for the characterization and monitoring of biodiversity. To evaluate its
utility, we should verify that such “bioacoustics” can accurately detect
ecological signal in spatiotemporal acoustic data. Targeting the
Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project sites in Brazil, we ask:
What is the relative contribution of the spatial, temporal and habitat
dimension to variation in bird acoustic communities in a previously
fragmented tropical rainforest? Does the functional diversity of bird
communities scale similarly to space and time as does species diversity,
when both are recorded by bioacoustics means? Overall, is the imprint of
landscape fragmentation 30 years ago still audible in the present‐day
soundscape? We sampled forty‐four sites in secondary forest and 107 sites
in old‐growth forest, resulting in 11,000 hours of audio recordings. We
detected 60 bird species with satisfactory precision and recovered a
linear log‐log relation between sampling time and species diversity. Sites
in primary forest host more species than sites in secondary forest, but
the difference decreased with sampling time, as the slope was slightly
higher in secondary than primary forests. Functional diversity, as exposed
by vocalizing birds, accumulates faster than does species diversity. The
similarity among local communities decreases with distance in both time
and space, but stability in time is remarkably high: two acoustic samples
from the same site one year (or more) apart prove more similar than two
samples taken at the same time but from sites situated just a few hundred
meters apart. These findings suggest that habitat modification can be
heard as a long‐lasting imprint on the soundscape of regenerating habitats
and identify Soundscape–Area and Soundscape–Time Relations as a promising
tool for biodiversity research, applied biomonitoring and restoration
ecology.