Changing sounds show the effects of Amazon fires on animal life

Acoustic recordings have been used around the clock to monitor the effects of logging and fires on biodiversity in tropical forests.

Danielle Rappaport of the University of Maryland and her colleagues used historical satellite data to select locations in the southern Brazilian Amazon that had logged logging or forest fires in the past few decades. They placed sound recorders at the sites in September and October 2016 to try to capture the acoustic markers for the degradation of the ecosystem.

The aim was to develop a measuring path …