Recording and analyzing all sounds coming from a landscape (referred to as the ‘soundscape’) is an emerging tool in the field of ecoacoustics that shows great promise for effectively monitoring animal biodiversity in tropical forests. Silvy's PhD research aims to develop and use ecoacoustics methods to investigate how primates are influenced by anthropogenic noise in their environment. She's working on (1) determining the full vocal repertoire of the red titi monkey (Plecturocebus discolor) to examine which call types are most likely to be influenced by anthropogenic noise, (2) determine if and how primates are affected by anthropogenic noise caused by traffic on an oil road and oil pumps in the Yasuni National Park and Biosphere Reserve.
Undergrad in a related field (biology, anthropology, neuroscience, engineering, etc.), interest in primatology and/or eco/bio-acoustics and/or wildlife conservation.
January 2019 – May 2020
I hope to find two or three undergrads that can help me out with some of the following:
- Conducting measurements on vocalizations of the red titi monkey (Plecturocebus discolor) in order to establish the functions and acoustic characteristics of the full vocal repertoire of this pair-living Neotropical primate.
- Determining time and frequency patterns of traffic on an oil road through the Amazon rainforest. (This easily done by hand, but if you want to try and build an algorithm that can do it automatically in Raven 1.5 or R/Python, you are more than welcome to try!
- Determining how far from the oil road primates are affected by road noise.
- Examining general daily soundscape patterns using code packages already written in R.
