This global project aimed to monitor the profound impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on urban soundscapes, taking advantage of the unique opportunity created by the drastic reduction in human activity around the world.
The pandemic led to an unprecedented global lockdown, which caused a sudden reduction in urban noise. This unexpected pause in human activity created a natural experiment, allowing researchers to record changes in city soundscapes across the world, where typical noise such as traffic, construction and industry significantly decreased. In the silence, the project revealed a host of previously masked animal sounds in urban environments.
The Silent Cities project set out to measure these changes and quantify the impact of human absence on urban soundscapes, shedding light on the interactions between human activity and biodiversity in cities.
The project gathered a total of 261 contributors from 35 countries across the world, all of whom deployed programmable audio recorders to capture acoustic data from 317 urban sites between March and October 2020. By recording soundscapes across a wide variety of urban settings, the research provided an unparalleled dataset that highlights both the diversity and commonalities of soundscapes worldwide during this extraordinary period of time.
The international scope of the dataset makes it uniquely valuable, offering insights that are both globally comprehensive and locally nuanced. Researchers and policymakers now have access to a deeper understanding of how urban wildlife adapted to the sudden absence of noise pollution. This knowledge can inform future strategies for sustainable urban development and biodiversity conservation, highlighting the need to balance human activity with the preservation of natural soundscapes.
If you want to learn more about this research, you can find the full paper here.
The ecoacoustics team at Baker Consultants are leading specialists in the use of soundscapes for wildlife surveys, conservation management and Environmental Impact Assessment.. If you would like to understand how we could help you on your projects, then please get in touch with us via our contact form on the website, call us on +44 (0)1629 593958 or email us on info@bakerconsultants.co.uk.