Biodiversity is often used to describe the abundance of plants and animals living together in a single ecosystem, such as a rainforest in South America. And sometimes biodiversity is more easily heard than it is seen. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
Tom Schulenberg is an ornithologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. Working together with Conservation International, he’s also a member of the Rapid Assessment Program, which conducts evaluations of biodiversity in wilderness areas.
“You can learn a great deal by listening to an ecosystem. If you walk through a forest, you are going to hear many more individual birds and many more species of birds than you’re going to see. So it would be pretty much impossible to conduct an adequate survey of any area without a good working knowledge of the songs and the calls that would be expected to occur in that area because you simply are not going to see everything that’s there.”
Some animal sounds end up speaking for an entire region.
ambience: Scarlet Macaw
“Scarlet Macaws would be what we would call an indicator species. Macaws are often captured and sold into the pet trade and so there are many areas of the Amazon where there still may be plenty of forest but there’s no Macaws left at all. If we’re in the field and we get into an area that has numbers of Macaws then we know we’re in an area that has been little disturbed and we would expect to be finding many other interesting species as well.”
Armed with their notebooks and their ears, scientists with the Rapid Assessment Program have conducted over twenty evaluations of wilderness areas in Africa and South America.
Additional funding for Pulse of the Planet has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.