National Park visitors perceive benefits for themselves and wildlife under blended red-white outdoor lighting.

Visitors to Colter Bay Village in Grand Teton National Park were surveyed to elicit their evaluations of experimental outdoor lighting conditions. Luminaires capable of dimming and switching between two LED modules (white, blended red-white) were installed in street and parking areas. The blended red-white lamps consisted of 30 narrowband LED with a peak wavelength 623 nm and two 3000 K white LEDs.

Experimental recreationist noise alters behavior and space use of wildlife.

Providing outdoor recreational opportunities to people and protecting wildlife are dual goals of many land managers. However, recreation is associated with negative effects on wildlife, ranging from increased stress hormones to shifts in habitat use to lowered reproductive success. Noise from recreational activities can be far reaching and have similar negative effects on wildlife, yet the impacts of these auditory encounters are less studied and are often unobservable.

Tiger beetles produce anti-bat ultrasound and are probable Batesian moth mimics.

Echolocating bats and their eared insect prey are in an acoustic evolutionary war. Moths produce anti-bat sounds that startle bat predators, signal noxiousness, mimic unpalatable models and jam bat sonar. Tiger beetles (Cicindelidae) also purportedly produce ultrasound in response to bat attacks.

Understanding park visitors' soundscape perception using subjective and objective measurement.

Environmental noise knows no boundaries, affecting even protected areas. Noise pollution, originating from both external and internal sources, imposes costs on these areas. It is associated with adverse health effects, while natural sounds contribute to cognitive and emotional improvements as ecosystem services.

Effects of wind turbine noise on songbird behavior during nonbreeding season.

Anthropogenic noise is one of the fastest growing, globally widespread pollutants, affecting countless species worldwide. Despite accumulating evidence of the negative impacts of wind turbines on wildlife, little is known about how the noise they generate affects ecological systems. Songbirds may be susceptible to noise pollution due to their reliance on vocal communication and thus, in this field study, we examined how songbirds are affected by wind turbine noise.

EcoCountHelper: an R package and analytical pipeline for the analysis of ecological count data using GLMMs, and a case study of bats in Grand Teton National Park.

Here we detail the use of an R package, 'EcoCountHelper', and an associated analytical pipeline aimed at making generalized linear mixed-effects model (GLMM)-based analysis of ecological count data more accessible. We recommend a GLMM-based analysis workflow that allows the user to (1) employ selection of distributional forms (Poisson negative binomial) and zero-inflation (ZIP and ZINB, respectively) using AIC and variance-mean plots, (2) examine models for goodness-of-fit using simulated residual diagnostics, (3) interpret model results easy to understand outputs of changes in predicted responses, and (4) compare the magnitude of predictor variable effects effects plots. Our package uses a series of easy-to-use functions that can accept both wide- and long-form multi-taxa count data without the need for programming experience.

Anti-bat ultrasound production in moths is globally and phylogenetically widespread.

Warning signals are well known in the visual system, but rare in other modalities. Some moths produce ultrasonic sounds to warn bats of noxious taste or to mimic unpalatable models. Here, we report results from a long-term study across the globe, assaying moth response to playback of bat echolocation.

Experimentally broadcast ocean surf and river noise alters birdsong.

Anthropogenic noise and its effects on acoustic communication have received considerable attention in recent decades. Yet, the natural acoustic environment's influence on communication and its role in shaping acoustic signals remains unclear. We used large-scale playbacks of ocean surf in coastal areas and whitewater river noise in riparian areas to investigate how natural sounds influences song structure in six songbird species.

A stochastic simulation model for assessing the masking effects of road noise for wildlife, outdoor recreation, and bioacoustic monitoring.

Traffic noise is one of the leading causes of reductions in animal abundances near roads. Acoustic masking of conspecific signals and adventitious cues is one mechanism that likely causes animals to abandon loud areas. However, masking effects can be difficult to document in situ and the effects of infrequent noise events may be impractical to study.

Hidden Phylogenomic Signal Helps Elucidate Arsenurine Silkmoth Phylogeny and the Evolution of Body Size and Wing Shape Trade-Offs.

One of the key objectives in biological research is understanding how evolutionary processes have produced Earth's diversity. A critical step toward revealing these processes is an investigation of evolutionary tradeoffs-that is, the opposing pressures of multiple selective forces. For millennia, nocturnal moths have had to balance successful flight, as they search for mates or host plants, with evading bat predators.

Bio-acoustic tracking and localization using heterogeneous, scalable microphone arrays.

Microphone arrays are an essential tool in the field of bioacoustics as they provide a non-intrusive way to study animal vocalizations and monitor their movement and behavior. Microphone arrays can be used for passive localization and tracking of sound sources while analyzing beamforming or spatial filtering of the emitted sound. Studying free roaming animals usually requires setting up equipment over large areas and attaching a tracking device to the animal which may alter their behavior.

Adaptive shifts underlie the divergence in wing morphology in bombycoid moths.

The evolution of flapping flight is linked to the prolific success of insects. Across Insecta, wing morphology diversified, strongly impacting aerodynamic performance. In the presence of ecological opportunity, discrete adaptive shifts and early bursts are two processes hypothesized to give rise to exceptional morphological diversification.

Assessing the Vulnerabilities of Vertebrate Species to Light and Noise Pollution: Expert Surveys Illuminate the Impacts on Specialist Species.

Global expansion of lighting and noise pollution alters how animals receive and interpret environmental cues. However, we lack a cross-taxon understanding of how animal traits influence species vulnerability to this growing phenomenon. This knowledge is needed to improve the design and implementation of policies that mitigate or reduce sensory pollutants.

Artificial night light and anthropogenic noise interact to influence bird abundance over a continental scale.

The extent of artificial night light and anthropogenic noise (i.e., "light" and "noise") impacts is global and has the capacity to threaten species across diverse ecosystems.

Noise distracts foraging bats.

Predators frequently must detect and localize their prey in challenging environments. Noisy environments have been prevalent across the evolutionary history of predator-prey relationships, but now with increasing anthropogenic activities noise is becoming a more prominent feature of many landscapes. Here, we use the gleaning pallid bat, , to investigate the mechanism by which noise disrupts hunting behaviour.

The phantom chorus: birdsong boosts human well-being in protected areas.

Spending time in nature is known to benefit human health and well-being, but evidence is mixed as to whether biodiversity or perceptions of biodiversity contribute to these benefits. Perhaps more importantly, little is known about the sensory modalities by which humans perceive biodiversity and obtain benefits from their interactions with nature. Here, we used a 'phantom birdsong chorus' consisting of hidden speakers to experimentally increase audible birdsong biodiversity during 'on' and 'off' (i.

Sensory pollutants alter bird phenology and fitness across a continent.

Expansion of anthropogenic noise and night lighting across our planet is of increasing conservation concern. Despite growing knowledge of physiological and behavioural responses to these stimuli from single-species and local-scale studies, whether these pollutants affect fitness is less clear, as is how and why species vary in their sensitivity to these anthropic stressors. Here we leverage a large citizen science dataset paired with high-resolution noise and light data from across the contiguous United States to assess how these stimuli affect reproductive success in 142 bird species.

An improved method for utilizing high-throughput amplicon sequencing to determine the diets of insectivorous animals.

DNA analysis of predator faeces using high-throughput amplicon sequencing (HTS) enhances our understanding of predator-prey interactions. However, conclusions drawn from this technique are constrained by biases that occur in multiple steps of the HTS workflow. To better characterize insectivorous animal diets, we used DNA from a diverse set of arthropods to assess PCR biases of commonly used and novel primer pairs for the mitochondrial gene, cytochrome oxidase C subunit 1 (COI).

Fireflies thwart bat attack with multisensory warnings.

Many defended animals prevent attacks by displaying warning signals that are highly conspicuous to their predators. We hypothesized that bioluminescing fireflies, widely known for their vibrant courtship signals, also advertise their noxiousness to echolocating bats. To test this postulate, we pit naïve big brown bats () against chemically defended fireflies () to examine whether and how these beetles transmit salient warnings to bats.

The evolution of anti-bat sensory illusions in moths.

Prey transmit sensory illusions to redirect predatory strikes, creating a discrepancy between what a predator perceives and reality. We use the acoustic arms race between bats and moths to investigate the evolution and function of a sensory illusion. The spinning hindwing tails of silk moths (Saturniidae) divert bat attack by reflecting sonar to create a misleading echoic target.

Acoustic environments matter: Synergistic benefits to humans and ecological communities.

Protected areas are critical locations worldwide for biodiversity preservation and offer important opportunities for increasingly urbanized humans to experience nature. However, biodiversity preservation and visitor access are often at odds and creative solutions are needed to safeguard protected area natural resources in the face of high visitor use. Managing human impacts to natural soundscapes could serve as a powerful tool for resolving these conflicting objectives.