Exploring nocturnal soundscapes in an Australian open-forest system using acoustic indices

Our study addresses a critical gap in ecological research: nocturnal environments remain underrepresented in the scientific literature despite their substantial ecological importance. This gap was first identified by Orlando Park in 1940 and later revisited by Kevin Gaston in 2019, who called for renewed attention to nighttime ecology. In this study, we highlight the ecological relevance of nocturnal environments as habitats that support a high diversity of vocal species across multiple taxonomic groups, making them especially suitable for biodiversity monitoring using acoustic approaches. We applied passive acoustic monitoring across two conserved reserves and quantified acoustic diversity during summer, when insect activity peaks, using a suite of acoustic indices. To evaluate the performance of these indices, we tested their association with sonotype richness. This repository contains the R scripts used in the analyses, the S1 and S2 Appendices, and the tables with annotated sonotype data and calculated acoustic indices. The audio dataset is available at https://archive.org/details/nocturnal_soundscapes_eucalypt_open_forest_202604