Journalists at The Guardian joined Carlos Abrahams and University of Warwick’s Jacqueline Stroud at Rothamsted Research, an agricultural research institution in Herefordshire, as they listened to the soundscapes underfoot as part of an ongoing DEFRA-funded two-year ecoacoustics project investigating the feasibility of using ecoacoustics for monitoring soil health.
The recordings captured from the soil are being added to a database for analysis, where the health of soil is measured through following the simple principle “a healthy soil is a noisy soil”. The ecoacoustics technology we’re developing will help enable us to more accurately measure the health of soil in a much less intrusive way than current methods that are being used.
This research is also supporting the development of a Soil Acoustic Meter, a hand-held device that will make collecting the sounds of soil much more accessible. The device enables its users to simply place a probe in the ground and collect soil sounds, where they can then measure the health of the soil. Such a device will support farmers, who currently have to dig sample pits and manually extract the worms from within – a much more labour intensive and costly exercise.
It’s great to see ecoacoustics entering the mainstream media once again, having previously found its way to local BBC News, BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 4 Today, as well as The Times and The Sunday Telegraph, and it’s even greater to have the team at Baker Consultants leading the discovery of uses for this powerful and rapidly evolving ecoacoustics technique. We’re looking forward to sharing more about our research in the months to come at shows such as Agri-Tech and Groundswell.
Read the full article from The Guardian here.
If you think this cutting-edge approach, or our established above-ground ecoacoustic monitoring services, could benefit your project, then please get in touch via ecoacoustics@bakerconsultants.co.uk.
Photography: Graeme Robertson | The Guardian