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6 years later I made another sound recording in a forest.
The question is is climate change audible?
Give your opinion (after listening to the audio file).

https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/681573/

This is the start of my investigation and questions. Thanks to journalist Femke for the tip.
It is an Bernie Krause TED talk:
https://youtu.be/uTbA-mxo858?t=214

That's an interesting study and really thanks for it. I strongly feel that sound can be an additional proof to track global warming, climate changes, and other nature related phenomenon. The human interference can clearly be tracked by increase in farmlands or cultivation lands closer to forests, domesticated animals venturing in nearby forests, regular cattle grazing and shepherding in forest lands, decrease in seasonal/migratory/endemic floral and faunal species, decrease in wind/rainfall. Years 2020-2022 can be seen as a recovery phase to some extent depending on the demography of the area due to pandemic which saw the recovery of nature - a case of self-healing and nature reaching the stages of climax community(https://www.bartleby.com/learn/free-expert-answers/what-is-a-climax-community). But post the removal of lockdown though the human interference in nature has got to its past toxic levels which is a huge sign of concern.

I think the answer is yes, but to prove it scientifically, we need a huge sample size. The same environment needs to be recorded constantly so it can be determined how much natural variation occurs there and how much of that variation is abnormal (e.g., how much of it is due to the natural ebb and flow of life and how much of it is due to human intervention specifically). You'd have to identify every species, know about every property acquisition and building project in the area, and much more. Only then could we reach anything like a definitive answer.

We also must remember that solar activity, global temperature, the length of a day, and countless other variables move in cycles independently of our intervention. Further, an increase in atmospheric CO2 is great for plants, which in turn are great for whatever lives in/among them, so global warming may in many areas result in less human sounds and more other sounds. In the case of my own yard, the yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria) has been extremely prolific this year. It grows densely enough to block sight and sound, and is an important shade/cover plant for creatures that don't want to go out into the open. Squirrels climb it, snakes rub against it to shed skin, and so on. And, the very presence of such cover has been inviting to other animals, especially cardinals, woodpeckers and barred owls.

All of this sounds fairly definitive but it's all based largely on data gathered within the last 3-4 months. I would have to continue this for probably 50-75 times longer to even begin understanding the greater whole in any non-humancentric way.

Thank you both for your input.

I find this subject very interesting, I have never asked myself this question

Mini Militia App Lock

klankbeeld: While I didn't realize it the last time I responded, I have been steadily collecting field recordings in my home yard environment for almost a year (see thread here).

I didn't collect daily recordings, so any data we glean from the field-recordings would be very fragmentary. But, if we really want to answer your initial question "Is climate change audible?", I can start collecting recordings more consistently. I do have one device that can be set to record between certain particular hours, for instance.

Perhaps we should seek out some eminent minds and ask them what kind of data to collect. Surely there's a wildlife expert or climatologist who can give us something to go on. I thought it might be useful to record in order to get data about the frequency and severity of rainfall and cold events (times when it gets cold enough to silence the crickets and other night creatures - somewhere around 45 degrees F, by my estimation). But, it could also be that this data is naturally too variable year-to-year, so we may not be able to make anything better than an abstract conclusion.

Any ideas for other questions to ask, other data to collect, or people to contact?

Thanks for your response @strangehorizon;

I'm curious to see if any scientists will come up with ideas. In the meantime, I will continue recording independently and meticulously record any information that may arise in the text.

I don't think we can count on the right kind of scientist to show up here and see this thread. We'll have to seek them out, so that's why I think we should brainstorm, decide on some good questions to ask, then maybe try posting on some sites (reddit, quora, or whatever) to see if we can attract the attention of someone who has the right knowledge to guide and refine our research. Maybe there are indicator sounds which are associated with climate change, much like how there are bioindicator animals whose presence or absence can tell you about an ecosystem's health.

Well, even if we get all that sorted, we'd still need to collect and collate the climate data (and probably a lot of other data) to establish a context for the field recordings and allow greater observations to made. The question of whether climate change is audible may be unanswerable, or may only lead to an assortment of other questions ("How much accuracy is acceptable?", "How do we establish a control group?", etc.)

I remember seeing this interesting video along the same lines as this topic: "The Sound of Extinction." Bernie Krause collected soundscapes of the same areas over the course of 40+ years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnpsMG0PWRY

It's interesting, but he isn't taking recordings nearly frequently enough to really know what's going on in these sites. Showing up once a week at the same time of day is only going to paint some of the picture. Animals have natural boom and bust periods, they migrate or go dormant, and they follow opportunities when they can. A lot can happen in an hour, let alone a week. Surely he must know all these things if he's going to this kind of effort.

If he does indeed visit sites weekly as he says, he'll have 52 recordings a year. I've got about 350 recordings of the same area and I'm not even a year in yet. Even with the 350, I can only piece together so much data about this ecosystem. I'm still identifying everything, and my recordings are mostly point-source, so, they record what's audible from one spot. We really need 24/7/365 monitoring of many adjacent sites at once (and that includes visuals too) to achieve much more than speculation about what we're hearing.

As an example: When I started field recording in late winter, barred owls were audible in the evening. Then during late spring and all of summer, I didn't catch a single one in a recording. Now in the fall, I hear them in the mornings. So their activity cycles change over time. Then there are times when I saw them, but they were silent. If I went purely on field recordings I would think "The owls quit nesting here" or "The owls moved away for a while", but I've seen them consistently, so neither of those thoughts would be factual. The owls were here the whole time.

So the whole time, they were building nests, mating, catching prey, barfing up owl pellets, and doing their part to cycle nutrients around. They were having an impact even when they went unheard and unseen by us. Surely all motile creatures must possess this sort of agency and this sort of potential - so, I don't think audio, visuals, biodiversity or activity level alone are enough to judge the health of an ecosystem. They might not be enough even when all taken together.

If a place is full of healthy living things, that should be good enough. We hope those living things will be evolved to live there and "belong" there, but the radiation of life itself ensures that just about everything will be scattered around by myriad events. Anything could end up anywhere, given enough time. Not all of these life forms make sounds or flashy visuals. Most of them are too small to see, or are hidden in the ground, or they possess their own mini ecosystems within themselves (like trees+epiphytes). The impact of their presence or absence is, at present, poorly understood.

Well, it's a complicated picture, but one that seems worth painting to some, including myself! This is very open-ended science which I think is the best kind.