Extending species-area relationships into the realm of ecoacoustics: The soundscape-area relationship

The rise in species richness with area is one of the few ironclad ecological relationships. Yet, little is known about the spatial scaling of alternative dimensions of diversity. Here, we provide empirical evidence for a relationship between the richness of acoustic traits emanating from a landscape, or soundscape richness, and island area, which we term the SoundScape-Area Relationship (SSAR). We show a positive relationship between the gamma soundscape richness and island area. This relationship breaks down at the smallest spatial scales, indicating a small-island effect. Moreover, we demonstrate a positive spatial scaling of the plot-scale alpha soundscape richness, but not the beta soundscape turnover, suggesting disproportionate effects combined with acoustic niche partitioning as an underlying mechanism. We conclude that the general scaling of biodiversity can be extended into the realm of ecoacoustics, implying soundscape metrics are sensitive to fundamental ecological patterns a..., Raw acoustic data:Acoustic data were collected at the Balbina Hydroelectric Reservoir in Brazilian Amazonia. We used a standardized spatial sampling design, scaling the number of plots per island with island size. Long-duration acoustic surveys were conducted at Balbina between July-December 2015, sampling 74 forest islands (Bueno et al. 2020). The number of sampling plots per island ranged from 1-7 and increased with island size. At each plot, a passive acoustic sensor was deployed on a tree trunk at 1.5 m height with the microphone pointing downward. Each sensor consisted of an LG smartphone in a waterproof case linked to an omnidirectional microphone, set to record 1 in every 5 min at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz for 4-10 days using the ARBIMON Touch application ( arbimon.rfcx.org). Due to poor recording quality, and to retain proportional sampling, some sites were excluded from the study, retaining 69 sampling plots (1-4 plots per island) on 49 islands (0.45 - 668.03 ha). 
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[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.p2ngf1vzw](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.p2ngf1vzw)

The data and code presented in this repository supports the analysis in *Luypaert et al. (2024): Extending species-area relationships to the realm of acoustics - the soundscape-area relationship.* The repository contains all required data and R scripts to calculate the soundscape richness acoustic index (alpha, beta and gamma), and assess the spatial variation of this index in relation to island size and isolation at the Balbina Hydroelectric Reservoir in Brazilian Amazonia. 

**Usage note**: Download the '*Luypaert_et_al_2024_RNotebooks.zip'*  file from this repository and unzip it in the desired location. If you are only interested in inspecting the code and outputs without running it, just inspect the '.html' files in sequential order from 1 to 10. If you want to try running the code, simply start ...