Anthropogenic outdoor sound and wildlife: it's not just bioacoustics!

Guillaume Dutilleux (1)

1 CETE Est - Centre d'études techniques de l'équipement Est

The two last decades have seen the growth of a large body of scientific and technical literature regarding the effects of anthropogenic noise on terrestrial wildlife and their mitigation. These effects range from behavioral modifications like signalling louder, increasing the signalling rate or redundancy, signalling at a higher pitch, signalling outside noisy periods, but also alterations of intraspecific or interspecific interactions. Moreover it is now proven that man-made noise may lead to reduced reproductive success, reduced species richness or reduced density. The careful design of experiments helps avoid methodological biases some more ancient studies in this field may suffer of. This paper reviews the published literature from an engineering perspective. The focus is put on recommendations for impact assessment and mitigation. The analysis carried out emphasizes that more attention paid to anthropogenic noise emission aspects, especially road surfaces, and propagation issues, in particular micro-meteorology and the range of validity of the prediction methods used, would significantly improve the guidance available.

Mots clés: wildlife; anthropogenic noise; impact; mitigation

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Guillaume Dutilleux. Anthropogenic outdoor sound and wildlife: it's not just bioacoustics!. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00810795⟩