Remote Sensing of the Soundscape at the Samford Ecological Research Facility, South East Queensland Peri-Urban SuperSite, Samford, 2010-2011

The Samford Ecological Research Facility (SERF) provides a unique opportunity to investigate the role of sensors as a means to characterize ecological change. SERF is located in the Samford Valley, west of Brisbane, Australia. The Samford Valley has been transformed from forest land to an agronomic system (banana plantations, dairy, horse farms) and recently to a low to moderate density urban system. SERF is centered in a 50 ha mix of native forest and old field succession. Stuart Gage, Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), is conducting research on acoustic sensing of the environment in collaboration with QUT scientists Peter Grace and Paul Roe and PhD Student Jason Wimmer. The deployment of acoustic sensor platforms at SERF will enable us to understand the role of acoustics to determine ecosystem quality and biodiversity. Cyber-infrastructure has been developed to place the recordings in the REAL Digital Library and process the observations. The REAL website provides browse and search accessibility to the recordings, their spectrograms and the data table created via automated processing (see http://www.real.msu.edu). The data is available at QUT's Bioacoustic Workbench site http://baw.ecosounds.org/