A buzz of bees, the deep song of a whale, the croak of a toad, or the almost inaudible squeaks of bats: these are the sounds that make up the new soundtrack of the wild planet. It's not a relaxation CD, but an ambitious scientific tool called Worldwide Soundscapes, unveiled this week by INRAE and published in the journal Global Ecology & BiogeographyThis unique project is led by Kevin Darras, a French ecobiologist based at INRAE Val-de-Loire. Noting that animal sound recordings are too often stored in isolation, he devised a global platform for sharing acoustic data. Over the past three years, he has brought together 350 experts from 57 countries, from the ocean to forests, from caves to polar regions. The result: a database of 409 datasets covering 12 recording sites on every continent.
From recording to sharing: towards global surveillance of life
The sounds collected, often after hours of silent waiting, make it possible to track species distribution, behavior, and the effects of climate change. They also reveal the presence of new, sometimes invasive, species and can be used to detect disturbances in ecosystems. But the challenge is also scientific and methodological. Worldwide Soundscapes serves as a living library, accessible to the entire scientific community, to avoid redundancies, facilitate collaboration, and promote existing work. Each recording is referenced like an entry in a sound dictionary: location, date, species heard, frequency... Everything is documented. All that remains is to refine the analysis, species by species, thanks to the expert ears of the researchers. In a world where biodiversity is collapsing at an alarming rate, this project offers a new form of vigilance, a collective and global sonic memory of nature. Listening becomes an act of science, and perhaps, one day, a tool for protection.
