As part of the Monitora Program, which has the main goal of assessing the effectiveness of the Brazilian Federal Protected Areas, since 2021 the ICMBio runs an acoustic monitoring project at the Serra do Cipó National Park, a core area of the Espinhaço Biosphere Reserve. The sampling protocol was designed to be modular, to cover different ecosystem types and to provide data for soundscape studies. The data is used to detect the main soundscape differences between sites and in a single location across time. Acoustic indices are used within the acoustic regions approach to generate seasonal signatures of the daily acoustic dynamic. Activity of birds, anurans, insects and mammals will be measured. Automated detection of species of interest will also contribute to the monitoring of taxa focus of conservation actions. We believe this sampling protocol has a great potential to soundscape monitoring of protected areas worldwide.
The Serra do Cipó National Park, core area of the Espinhaço Range Biosphere Reserve, is a Brazilian protected area with great diversity of ecosystems, including rupestrian fields commonly found in locations greater than 900 meters above sea level and two biodiversity hotspot biomes: Cerrado savannah and Atlantic Forest.
The Monitora is one of the largest biodiversity monitoring programs in the world. It has the main goals of assessing the effectiveness of the Brazilian Federal Protected Areas, contributing to the evaluation of species conservation status, providing data on invasive species, and detecting biodiversity variations due to climate change. However, generating comparable data on different ecosystems is a technical challenge. Traditionally, each ecosystem type forest, grassland, desert etc has its own sampling methods. There is a need for standardized in situ sampling protocols capable of providing information on biodiversity states and trends in different biomes. To address this challenge, the ICMBio started an acoustic monitoring project at the Serra do Cipó National Park. The sampling protocol was designed to be modular, to cover different ecosystem structures and to provide data for soundscape studies. This protocol has a great potential for protected areas worldwide.
The sampling protocol consists in recording 1/10 minutes one minute of recording followed by 9 minutes of pause; every 1/10 days one day of recording followed by 9 days of pause. It follows a random-systematic design to guarantee constant spacing between groups of acoustic stations as well as allowing a random selection of locations. Four squares of 707 meters side were randomly selected from a grid drawn on a remote area in the park. Each corner of each square selected has received a recording station, totalling 16 recorders. The sampling design is modular, allowing sampling in PAs of different sizes and shapes.
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