2017 Eclipse Soundscape

We collected acoustic data at eight sites in Greenville County (Figure 1) along an urban development gradient from downtown Greenville to the foothills of the well protected Blue Ridge described in (Wood and Quinn 2016 and Ernstes and Quinn 2015). Each location was within the full path of totality. One challenge in the past for sampling the soundscape of an ephemeral event as an eclipse along any gradient is the requirement of concurrent sampling. Remote sensing using passive acoustic recorders allows a large amount of data to be collected in different locations at the same time, crucial for being able to conduct this study. We placed automated recording units (ARU, Wildlife Acoustics SM2) at each site approximately 1.5 meters off the ground. We set the ARU’s to record at a sampling rate of 16000 hz. Recorders were set to record for a total of 5 hours from 12:00 pm to 17:00 pm during the window when the total solar eclipse would be taking place on August 21st, 2017. The period of totality was from 2:38 pm to 2:40 pm.