Editor’s note: This year’s biannual Biodiversity COP was in Cali, Colombia, a country with the dubious distinction of topping the list of the number of environmental activists killed by a country in both 2022 (60) and 2023 (79) and will probably have that dubious honor this year with a continuingly rising number of (115) as of November 7th.

By TONY KIRBY | ANNA ABRAHAM | CESAR QUIROZ / Mongabay

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — While music played in Bogotá’s streets and a sense of victory filled the air after a long protest, Ana Graciela received a new appointment on her calendar: the funeral of Carlos Andrés Ascué Tumbo.

Nicknamed Lobo (meaning “wolf” in Spanish), the esteemed Indigenous guardian and educational coordinator was killed Aug. 29, while his fellow guardians, the Kiwe Thegnas (or Indigenous Guard of Cauca) were protesting for better security in Cauca, Colombia. The region has increasingly become dangerous with incursions by illegal armed groups.

“The situation is tough. Women and children are being killed [almost] every day,” said Ana Graciela Tombé, coordinator of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca.

The Bogotá protest gathered more than 4,000 people, in what is known as a minga in the Andean tradition, against escalating violence in the region. After eight days, on Aug. 28, the Indigenous communities succeeded in getting President Gustavo Petro to sign a new decree, the Economic and Environmental Territorial Authority, which grants Indigenous territories greater autonomy to take judicial action against violence within their lands.

But the sentiment is bittersweet for the Indigenous Nasa and Misak activists in Ana’s homeland of Cauca, particularly in Pueblo Nuevo, a nationally recognized Indigenous territory (resguardo). They’ve lost a dear leader and role model, impassioned with protecting their ancestral territory, forests and youth from illegal armed groups.

Labeled the deadliest country for environmental defenders in 2023, Carlos, 30, was the 115^th social leader killed in Colombia this year, according to the Development and Peace Institute, Indepaz.

Although the police investigation into his death is still underway, members of his community say they believe Carlos was the latest victim of armed groups and drug traffickers the Nasa people have struggled with for more than 40 years. Mongabay spoke with these members of the community, including Carlos’ family and friends, to gather more information on his life and killing that received little attention in the media.

Pueblo Nuevo is located in the central mountain range of the Andes in the Cauca department, which today has become a hub for drug trafficking and illicit plant cultivation. This is due to its proximity to drug trafficking routes to ship drugs to international markets, the absence of state presence and the remoteness of the mountains.

The loss of Carlos is both physical and spiritual, a close friend of Carlos, Naer Guegia Sekcue, told Monagaby. He left behind a void in the lives of his family which they are trying to fill with love, Naer said, and the community and guardians feel like they lost a part of their rebellion against armed groups.

The ‘Wolf’

Carlos was a member of the Indigenous Guard since his childhood. The children’s section of the Guard is called semillas, meaning “seeds,” for how they’ll fruit into the next generation of leaders protecting their territory.

He met his wife, Lina Daknis, through mutual friends at university. Lina, though not of Indigenous heritage, said she fell in love with his rebellious spirit, devotion and commitment to Indigenous rights. When Lina became pregnant, the couple decided to raise their daughter in the Indigenous reserve, Pueblo Nuevo.

For many in this Indigenous community, their lands and forests are far more than mere sustenance; they hold deep traditional and spiritual significance. Among the Nasa people, one significant ritual involves burying the umbilical cord under stones of a sacred fire (tulpa), symbolically tying them to their ancestral territories. According to the sources Mongabay spoke to, they consider that the lands and forests do not belong to them but are a loan from their children they are entrusted to protect.

Carlos was fully dedicated to this Indigenous Guard, Lina said.

Many days, he would get up in the middle of the night to patrol the territory. While facing well-equipped armed groups, the Indigenous Guard remained unarmed. They carry a ceremonial wooden baton, adorned with green and white strings as symbols of Indigenous identity. Carlos was particularly outspoken against illegal armed groups and coca cultivation. Faced with their invasions and deforestation on their territory, the Guard also took on the role of environmental defenders.

Coca cultivation, as done by armed groups to produce cocaine, not only impacts lives, but also the environment. The traditionally sacred crop is now tied to violence and degradation in the region.

According to Colombia’s Ministry of Justice, 48% of cultivation is concentrated in special management areas, including national parks, collective territories and forest reserves. Between 2022 and 2023, coca cultivation caused the deforestation of 11,829 hectares (29,200 acres) of forested land, according to the latest report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. This deforestation increased by 10% in 2023 and threatens biodiversity, placing more than 50 species at risk of extinction, the Ministry of Justice stated at the COP16 U.N. biodiversity conference.

In one instance, Carlos and the Guard destroyed coca plants, took photos and uploaded videos to social media. Shortly after, his family began receiving threats from anonymous people on social media, warning Carlos to be careful. Lina now said she believes these threats came from dissident groups profiting from coca cultivation.

In Cauca, several dissident groups are active, including Estado Central Mayor and the Dagoberto Ramos Front. These factions emerged following the 2016 peace agreement and consist of former FARC guerrillas who either rejected or abandoned the reintegration process. Law enforcement say their presence poses a persistent threat. Most recently, in May, a police station in Caldono was attacked, with local authorities suspecting the involvement of the Dagoberto Ramos Front.

Despite the danger, Carlos never stopped his work.

“I told him to leave the Guard, to go to another country, that they would kill him,” said his mother, Diana Tumbo. “But he didn’t leave us nor the Guard.”

The seeds of tomorrow

The road to the Carlos’ home is surrounded by peaceful landscapes: small villages, chicken restaurants and hand-built huts. But the graffiti on walls — “FARC EP” (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, People’s Army) and “ELN Presente” (National Liberation Army, Present) — are stark reminders of the violence. Despite the peace agreement signed between the FARC and the Colombian government in 2016, violence has resurged in Cauca.

Carlos saw the armed groups as a destructive force to youth by recruiting minors.

According to the annual report of the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, armed groups forcibly recruited at least 71 Indigenous children in 2023. Oveimar Tenorio, leader of the Indigenous Guard, said the armed groups no longer have the political ideology that once defined the FARC. Instead, their attacks on the Indigenous Guard are driven by profit and control of drug routes.

“We are an obstacle for them,” he told Mongabay.

Carlos became an educational coordinator, supporting teachers with Indigenous knowledge programs and organized workshops for the schools in the Sath Tama Kiwe Indigenous Territory. He believed in educating youth not just with academic knowledge, but with a sense of pride in their Indigenous heritage and the need to protect their land, Naer said.

Carlos encouraged the young people not to feel ashamed of being Indigenous, but instead to learn from their own culture. He always carried a book by Manuel Quintín Lame, a historical Indigenous Nasa leader from Cauca who defended Indigenous autonomy in the early 20^th century.

But Carlos’ approach was one of tenderness; he was always listening to his students and fighting for a better future for the youth. “He was convinced that real change started from the bottom up, through children and the youth,” Naer said.

Murder of the ‘Wolf’

His friends and family said Carlos’ actions made him a target.

On Aug. 29, 2024, Carlos went down to the village of Pescador, Caldono, to pick up his daughter from swimming lessons. It was a peaceful moment: mother, father and daughter having a family meal at a small restaurant. Afterward, Carlos went to refuel his motorbike at the gas station.

Suddenly, a stranger approached his wife in the restaurant, she said, asking, ‘Are you the woman who is with the man with the long hair? Something has happened, but I can’t say what.’

Carlos Andrés Ascué Tumbo of the Andes Mountains was shot in the head.

The Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca quickly blamed “criminal structures” linked to dissident FARC groups, particularly the Jaime Martínez and Dagoberto Ramos factions. However, the police investigation is ongoing, and the Fiscalía General de la Nación (Office of the Attorney General), which is overseeing the case, has not shared details with the public or Mongabay.

Mongabay approached Fiscalía General de la Nación and local authorities for comment but did not receive one by the time of publication.

Sept. 1, in a small village perched on a hillside, marked the date of Carlos’ funeral. Fellow members of the Indigenous Guard, wearing blue vests and carrying their batons, lined the dusty roads. They formed a solemn procession from Carlos’ house down to the cemetery with about 1,000 people walking around them through Pueblo Nuevo.

“We want to show our strength,” said Karen Julian, a university student in Cauca who didn’t know Carlos personally but felt compelled to attend his funeral. Along with others, she boarded a brightly painted chiva bus to Carlos’ home village, where he was laid to rest.

Children holding flowers led the way of the procession, followed by a cross and then the coffin. A woman rang the church bell and people chanted the slogan to resist armed groups: “Until when? Until forever!”

At the covered sports field at the center of the village, the funeral transformed into a political rally. “I will not allow another young person to die!” Carlos’ mother shouted to the audience. “I demand justice.” She spoke of her worries for her granddaughter, Carlos’ daughter, who stills had many plans with her father. She called on the community to stand united against the violence that has taken so many lives.

As Carlos’ coffin was lowered into the ground, the crowd began to swell, pressing in tightly with his 6-year-old daughter at the front row of the mass. All were watching as the coffin reached its final destination.

“Carlos’ death was not in vain,” Naer said. “The youth understand that they must follow his path. The younger generations will continue preserving the Indigenous traditions while defending our territories and rights.”

Editor’s note: Major plastic polluters win as the UN Treaty talks conclude without an agreement. Modern lifestyles and practices are intimately entwined with the use of plastics. Our phones, computers, food packaging, clothes, and even renewable energy technologies, such as wind turbine blades and the cables that connect them to the power grid, are all largely made from plastics. Plastics production requires fossil hydrocarbons and this connection continues to grow stronger daily. Powerful oil producers, both private companies and governments of oil-producing nations, were seen as the key impediment to a consensus deal. What will happen next? “Agree to a treaty among the willing even if that means leaving some countries that don’t want a strong treaty or concede to countries that will likely never join the treaty anyway, failing the planet in the process.”

“Plastic has been found everywhere on Earth — from deepest oceans to high mountains, in clouds and pole to pole. Microplastics have also been found in every place scientists look for them in the human body, from the brain to the testes, breast milk, and artery plaque. Microplastics pose health risks to humans and wildlife, researchers warn.” PFAS(perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances) – “forever chemicals” contaminate biosolids(waste from sewage) used as fertilizer and pesticides, they also contain heavy metals and nitrates.

Today’s cheerleaders for increased birth rates are well aware of the silent cause of the ongoing rapid decline in male sperm counts. It’s the very industries these corporate managers run and governments regulate that is the blame. So you can be almost 100 percent sure that they are not going to address the real problem in order to achieve the goal of increasing human birth rates.

Laws must mandate companies to reduce their plastic footprint through production reduction, product redesign, or reuse systems — higher-priority strategies in the Zero Waste hierarchy,

By Sharon Guynup / Mongabay

Bottlenose dolphins leapt and torpedoed through the shallow turquoise waters off Florida’s Sarasota Bay. Then, a research team moved in, quickly corralling the small pod in a large net.

With the speed of a race car pit crew, veterinarians, biologists and their assistants examined the animals, checking vital signs while taking skin, blood and other samples. They held a petri dish over each dolphin’s blowhole until it exhaled, with an intensity similar to a human cough. Then, they rolled up the net and the dolphins swam off unharmed. A pod in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay was similarly tested.

Generations of dolphins have been part of this ongoing dolphin health study, which has been run by the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program since 1970. It tracks populations and individuals and also looks for health issues related to pollutants in the marine environment.

In the lab, scientists discovered that all 11 of the dolphins had breathed out microplastic fibers, shed from synthetic clothing, says Leslie B. Hart, associate professor at the College of Charleston and an author on this research. The fibers resembled those found in human lungs in previous studies, proving that dolphins, like us, are breathing plastic. In people, microplastic has been linked to poor lung function and possible lung disease.

An earlier collaboration linked phthalates circulating in the dolphins’ blood to alterations in their thyroid hormone levels — an effect also found in humans that can impact nearly every organ in the body. Phthalates, toxic chemicals found in flexible plastics, readily leach into the environment. The full effects on marine mammals remain unknown.

The dolphin studies are part of a larger quest to understand how plastic pollution is impacting the world’s wildlife. While thousands of human studies have demonstrated damage from tiny plastic particles entering both cells and organs throughout the body, little is known about animal impacts because long-term field studies are difficult and costly. “We’re really just starting to skim the surface,” Hart says.

Beyond the threat plastics pose to individual animals and species, other researchers have detected broader, global harm, a new report warns. Plastic pollution is transforming Earth systems needed to support life, worsening climate change, increasing biodiversity loss, making oceans more acidic and more.

The plastics crisis is escalating rapidly: Each year, petrochemical manufacturers make more than 500 million tons of plastics –– but the world recycles just 9%. The rest is burned, landfilled or ends up in rivers, rainwater, the air, soil or the sea. Today, the planet is awash in plastic. “It’s everywhere. It’s pervasive and it’s persistent,” says Andrew Wargo, who focuses on ecosystem health at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

Since the 1930s the polymers industry has completely altered daily life: Plastics are in our homes, cars, clothes, furniture, and electronics, as well as our single-use throwaway water bottles, food packaging and takeout containers.

In 2022, the U.N. Environment Assembly voted to address the plastic crisis by creating a legally binding international plastics treaty in hope of curbing and regulating production. But plastics-producing nations, including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the U.S. resisted progress, influenced by a $712 billion plastics and petrochemicals industry and its lobbyists.

A critically important fifth round of negotiations begins Nov. 25 when delegates hope to hammer out final treaty language for ratification by U.N. member states.

Meanwhile, the natural world is in great danger, threatened by a biodiversity crisis, a climate crisis and serious degradations of planetary systems. Researchers are now scrambling to understand the growing threat plastics pose to the health of all living organisms.

Plastics conquer the world

Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic product ever made, came on the market in 1907. By the 1950s, production ramped up, changing the course of history and revolutionizing modern life. Plastics facilitated innumerable human innovations — and spawned a throwaway culture. Add in poorly regulated petrochemical manufacturing processes and industrial fishing’s plastic gear, and global plastic pollution stats soared.

People have now produced some 11 billion metric tons of plastic. Globally, we discard 400 million tons of plastic waste every year; without controls imposed on overproduction, that may reach 1.1 billion tons within the next 25 years.

It can take 500-1,000 years for plastic to break down, and scientists are beginning to question whether it ever fully degrades. Today, 50-75 trillion microplastic particles litter the seas, according to a United Nations estimate, 500 times more than all the stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Microscopic life in the ocean has been dubbed “the Plastisphere,” with early research finding that even phytoplankton, the food-web base vital to marine ecosystems, is under threat.

Plastic debris was first noticed in the oceans in the early 1960s. For a long time, ecologists’ main wildlife concerns focused on the threat to sea turtles and other marine creatures that ate plastic bags or became tangled in plastic fishing nets. Now, everything from zooplankton to sharks and seabirds eat it and are exposed to it.

Hart emphasizes the problem’s global scope: “Plastic pollution has been found on every continent and in every ocean, in people, terrestrial wildlife and marine wildlife.” It contaminates creatures across the tree of life and concentrates up the food chain, threatening

every living thing, from insects, rodents, rhinos and frogs to clams, whales, snakes, wildcats and a host of migratory animals. Carried to the poles on wind and tide, even Arctic foxes and penguins carry microplastics.

Insidious plastic harm to health

It’s well known that animals regularly mistake plastic debris for food. Shearwaters and other seabirds, for example, can choke and starve when plastic pieces block their digestive tracts or pierce internal organs. At least 1,565 species are known to ingest plastic. For decades, scientists have noted dead animals ensnared in plastic nets, fishing gear or six-pack rings.

But those big pieces of petrochemical plastic (along with their chemical additives) don’t decompose; they degrade into ever-smaller pieces, getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, they break down into microplastics, tiny particles no bigger than a grain of sand, or become nanoparticles, visible only under a high-powered microscope. These microplastics can leach toxic chemicals. Of the more than 13,000 chemicals currently used in plastics, at least 3,200 have one or more “hazardous properties of concern,” according to a U.N. report.

Most of what we know today about the health impacts of plastics and their chemical additives is based on human medical research, which may offer clues to what happens to animals; that’s unlike most health research, which is done on animals and extrapolated to people.

We know from human medical research that microplastics can damage cells and organs and alter hormones that influence their function. Plastic particles have crossed the blood-brain barrier. They have lodged in human bone marrow, testicles, the liver, kidneys and essentially every other part of the body. They enter the placenta, blood and breast milk. Exposure may affect behavior and lower immunity.

And what plastics do to us, they likely do to animals. The phthalates found in Florida dolphins, for example, along with phenols, parabens and per- and polyfluoroalkyls, are just a fraction of the many endocrine disruptors released by plastics and their chemical additives that can alter hormone levels and derail body functions. Exposure may affect behavior and lower immunity.

Doctors have confirmed links between plastic and human disease and disability. “They cause premature birth, low birth weight, and stillbirth as well as leukemia, lymphoma, brain cancer, liver cancer, heart disease and stroke,” Phil Landrigan, a pediatrician and environmental health expert stated in a press conference earlier this year.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals can also interfere with reproduction in humans: They’re partially responsible for sperm counts that dropped to one-seventh of 1940s levels. These chemicals can also damage the placenta and ovaries. Experts think this is likely happening in animals, too, raising serious concern for endangered species already in decline.

In the wild, animals are now exposed daily to microplastics, eating and breathing them, while many freshwater and marine species swim in a plastic soup. But little is known about the long-term impacts of chronic exposure or what microplastics do within animal tissues, with even less understood about what happens when microplastics shrink to nano size and easily enter cells.

There are some data: Oysters produce fewer eggs. Pregnant zebrafish can pass nano-polystyrene to their embryos, while other research showed plastic exposure slowed fish larvae growth rates. Seabirds, including shearwaters, develop “plasticosis,” a newly declared disease characterized by thick scarring in the stomach due to plastic ingestion, which inhibits digestion. Microplastics also damage the heart structure of birds and permeate the liver, muscle and intestines in cod.

In lab experiments, microplastics in the lungs of pregnant rats easily passed to their fetuses’ brains, hearts and other organs. In adult mice, plastic nanoparticles crossed the blood-brain barrier, triggering swift changes that resembled dementia. In a wild animal, cognitive decline can quickly prove fatal, making it difficult to find food, avoid predators, mate or raise young.

In the lab, fish were more susceptible to a common virus after a one-month exposure to microplastic. They then shed more virus (a fish public health problem) and died in high numbers. Surprisingly, “there’s a lot of similarities between fish and humans, so that we have a lot of the same immune pathways,” explains Wargo, an author on this study. However, the reaction depended on the type of plastic. Nylon fibers had the biggest effect; most nylon sheds from synthetic clothing.

One challenge to researching health impacts, Wargo explains, is that “plastics oftentimes are lumped into one category, but they’re [all] very different: their structure, chemical composition, their shape and size,” creating thousands of variations. These factors influence how toxic they are, he says, which likely varies between individual animals and different species. Investigation is further complicated and obstructed by petrochemical companies that zealously guard their proprietary polymer product formulas.

The ubiquity of plastics and their global presence means that polymers likely have many undetected and unstudied wildlife health impacts. Some impacts could be masked by other environmental stressors, and untangling and analyzing the particulars will likely take decades.

What we do know is that the poor health, decline or disappearance of a single species within a natural community ripples outward, affecting others, and damaging interconnected ecological systems that have evolved in synchrony over millennia. Here’s just one speculative concern: We know microplastics can bioaccumulate, so apex predators, which balance ecosystems by keeping prey species in check, may be at high risk because they consume and build up large concentrations of microplastics and additive chemicals in their organs.

Plastics harm wildlife –– and humans –– in additional ways: by polluting the air and contributing to climate extremes. Currently, about 19% of plastic waste is incinerated, releasing potentially harmful chemical aerosols into the air. In addition, plastic production sends 232 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere yearly. Then there’s the pollution and carbon released from fracking and drilling operations to source the oil and gas to make these products.

Lastly, the microplastics animals and humans ingest are “Trojan horses.” These tiny particles absorb and carry a wide range of pollutants and bacteria, which then can enter and lodge within our bodies.

Stanching ‘a global-scale deluge of plastic waste’

Climate change and the plastics crisis spring from the same source: The world’s seven largest plastic manufacturers are fossil fuel companies. The U.S. produces the most plastic waste of any country, more than the entire EU combined: 42 million metric tons annually, or 287 pounds per person, according to a 2022 congressional report. It noted that “The success of the 20th-century miracle invention of plastics has also produced a global-scale deluge of plastic waste seemingly everywhere we look.”

Consumers can take small actions to protect themselves and limit plastic pollution by avoiding single-use plastics and carrying reusable bags and stainless-steel water bottles. Disposable fast-food packaging makes up almost half of plastic garbage in the ocean, so cutting back on takeout and bottled water could help.

But realistically addressing the planet’s plastics emergency requires a global paradigm shift that reframes the discussion. Many nations still think of plastics as a waste management issue, but responsibility needs to fall on the shoulders of regulators — and the producers, specifically fossil fuel companies and petrochemical manufacturers.

An international consortium of scientists has stressed the need for “urgent action” in the run-up to this month’s United Nations plastics treaty negotiations, the fifth and hopefully final summit intended to establish international regulations.

The U.S. had been among the largest, most influential dissenters in efforts to limit global plastics production and identify hazardous chemicals used in plastics. But in August 2024, prior to the U.S. presidential election, the Biden administration publicly announced it had toughened its position, supporting production limits, but submitted no position paper. Then, this week it returned to its earlier stance that would protect the plastics industry from production caps.

The plastics treaty summit in Busan, South Korea, beginning Nov. 25 and ending Dec. 1, aims to finalize treaty language that will then need to be ratified by the world’s nations. Regardless of the summit’s outcome, scientists continue to uncover new evidence of plastic’s dangers to humans, animals and the planet, raising the alarm and need for action.

Editor’s note: “Our heating of the Earth through carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution, is closely connected to our excessive energy consumption. And with many of the ways we use that energy, we’re also producing another less widely discussed pollutant: industrial noise. Like greenhouse-gas pollution, noise pollution is degrading our world—and it’s not just affecting our bodily and mental health but also the health of ecosystems on which we depend utterly.”

“Our study presents a strong, albeit selfish, argument for protecting natural soundscapes.”

Wind turbines in coastal waters, along with the noise from construction and surveys, have led to concerns about their impact on marine life. “In particular, cetaceans such as whales and dolphins are likely to be sensitive to the noises and increased marine traffic brought by these turbines.” These marine mammals’ survival depends on the technology of bounce to hear noise thousands of miles away through echolocation.

There are growing concerns regarding artificial sounds produced in waters that could impact marine life negatively. The effects of ocean noise produced by sonar, oil and gas exploration, offshore wind, and ship traffic could alter the behavior of mammals and cause hearing loss or potentially even death. “The latest discovery in this field could provide substantial ground for alterations in the Marine Mammal Protection Act that dictated the kind of noise-inducing activities that can be carried out in the waters. This new conclusion could hinder the scale of the activities or even get certain types of equipment banned from use at sites.”

‘It’s nonstop’: how noise pollution threatens the return of Norway’s whales.

By Abhishyant Kidangoor / Mongabay

It started as a simple spreadsheet that documented locations where researchers were recording sound to monitor biodiversity. Three years on, the Worldwide Soundscapes project is a global database on when, how and where passive acoustic monitoring is being deployed around the world to study terrestrial as well as aquatic ecosystems.

“This is a project that is now becoming too big to be handled by only one person,” Kevin Darras, currently senior researcher at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), who conceived the project, told Mongabay in a video interview.

Darras started the project when he was a postdoctoral researcher at Westlake University in China. The idea struck when he was waiting for updates on another project he was working on at the time. With the project, Darras said he was attempting to fill a void that often led to duplication of efforts in the research community that uses passive acoustic monitoring — audio recorders left out in the wild — to study biodiversity around the world. “There was a scientific gap in the sense that we didn’t know where and when we were sampling sound for monitoring biodiversity,” he said.

Passive acoustic monitoring has long been used to listen in on insects, birds and other animals in ecosystems around the world. It’s aided scientists to detect elusive species in a noninvasive manner. For example, a team in Australia used acoustic recorders and artificial intelligence to track down the breeding hollows of pink cockatoos (Lophochroa leadbeateri leadbeateri) in a remote region. The method has also helped researchers get insights into the behavioral and communications patterns of animals.

Despite advances in recent years with more sophisticated recorders and automated data analysis, Darras said researchers still haven’t “achieved standardization in terms of deployment or analysis.” Darras said he hoped to use the Worldwide Soundscapes project to help build a supportive network that could potentially work toward harmonizing approaches to passive acoustic monitoring.

“We hope people will look at the data and see what is already done to avoid duplication,” he said. “They might also probably find a colleague’s work and wonder, ‘Oh, why is this gap not filled? Maybe I can do something there.’”

Kevin Darras spoke with Mongabay’s Abhishyant Kidangoor on why he started the Worldwide Soundscapes project, how he envisions it growing into a global network, and the potential of ecoacoustics in biodiversity monitoring. The following interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mongabay: To start with, how would you describe the Worldwide Soundscapes project to someone who knows nothing about it?

Kevin Darras: In a fairly simple way, I would describe it as a simple inventory of what has been done globally, whether it’s aquatic or terrestrial, in terms of acoustic recording for monitoring biodiversity. Our first goal was to compile something like a phonebook for connecting people who are usually separated by the realms that we study. What I mean by that is we don’t communicate as much among ourselves. For example, marine scientists usually don’t talk much with terrestrial scientists. We have now succeeded in connecting and bringing people together. However, very early on, we realized that we could do more than that, and that we could put our metadata together to get a comprehensive picture of what is going on worldwide in terms of acoustic sampling.

Mongabay: What gaps were you trying to fill with this project?

Kevin Darras: There was a scientific gap in the sense that we didn’t know where and when we were sampling sound for monitoring biodiversity. There was also this gap in the community that made us not so well aware of the developments in other fields. There have been a lot of parallel efforts in different realms when, in reality, the same solutions might already exist in other communities. Our aim is to first make everyone aware of what is out there and ideally, one day, to harmonize our approaches and to benefit from each other’s experience.

Mongabay: Could you give me an example of how acoustic research efforts were duplicated in the past?

Kevin Darras: There are lots of examples when it comes to sound recording, calibration and the deployment of equipment. Because deployment in the deep sea is very much more troublesome and costly, our marine scientists go to great lengths to calibrate their equipment to make every deployment really worth it and to get data that are standardized. As a result, they are able to usually measure noise levels, for instance. Whereas those of us in the terrestrial realm have access to such cheap recorders that setting them up is almost too easy. The consequence is that, generally, we have very large study designs where we deploy hundreds of sensors and recorders and end up with a massive data set that, unfortunately, isn’t very well calibrated. We would only have relative sound levels and won’t be able to really measure noise levels.

On the other hand, I think the community that does terrestrial monitoring has made some great strides with respect to the use of artificial intelligence for identifying sound. By now, we have achieved a pretty consistent approach to bird identification with AI. This is something that could benefit people working in the aquatic realm who often have custom-made analysis procedures.

Mongabay: What was the spark to get started with this?

Kevin Darras: It started three years ago. I was actually busy with another project where I was working on an embedded vision camera. Between the development rounds, we had some time where we were waiting for the next prototype. Rather than just sit and wait, I told my supervisor that I wanted to start another project while waiting for updates. This is when I started contacting people from my close network to find out where they’ve been recording. It started with filling an online spreadsheet, which has grown since then. By now, I believe, a good portion of the community that uses passive acoustic monitoring knows about the project.

Mongabay: Could you tell me how it works currently?

Kevin Darras: The way it currently works is that people find out from their colleagues. Or we actively search for them. Then we send them all the basic information about the project. We ask them to fill in the data in a Google spreadsheet, but we are slowly transitioning to enter everything directly on a website. In the very beginning of the project, we didn’t have the capability, and we needed a really easy and effective way of adding people’s data. A Google spreadsheet was a fairly good idea then. Then we validate the data to see if things make sense. We cross-validate them with our collaborators after showing them the timelines and the maps that represent when and where their recordings have been made. In the end, there is a map which shows where all sounds have been recorded. For each collection, you can also view when exactly the recordings have been made.

Mongabay: Could you give me a sense of the kind of data in the database?

Kevin Darras: If you were a potential contributor, you would have to first provide some general information. Who are the people involved? Are the data externally stored recordings or links? Then we would get to the level of the sampling sites. We require everyone to provide coordinates and also to specify what were the exact ecosystems they were sampling sounds in. That’s the spatial information.

For the temporal information, we ask people to specify when their deployments started and when it stopped, with details on date and time. We also ask for whether they are scheduled recordings with predefined temporal intervals, like daily or weekly, or duty-cycled recordings, meaning one minute or every five minutes, or if they are continuous recordings.

We also request audio parameters like the sampling frequency, high-pass filters, number of channels, the recorders and microphones that they used. Lastly, we ask them to specify whether their deployments were targeting particular [wildlife], which is not always the case. Sometimes people just record soundscapes with a very holistic view.

Mongabay: How do you hope this database will help the community that uses passive acoustic monitoring?

Kevin Darras: We hope people will look at the data and see what is already done to avoid duplication. They might also probably find a colleague’s work and wonder, “Oh, why is this gap not filled? Maybe I can do something there.”

Mongabay: What surprised you the most?

Kevin Darras: It’s probably how big some of these studies were. I was amazed by the sampling effort that, for instance, some Canadian groups did over hundreds of sites over many years.

Also surprising for me was that there were some really gaping holes in our coverage in countries where I would have thought that the means existed for conducting eco-acoustic studies. Many North African countries don’t seem to be doing passive acoustic monitoring. We’ve just had our first collaborator from Turkey. Central Asia is poorly covered. This is for terrestrial monitoring.

For marine monitoring, I was actually surprised to see that the coverage was rather homogeneous. It’s sparse because it’s more difficult to deploy things underwater, but it was globally well distributed. I was surprised to see how many polar deployments there were, for instance, under very challenging conditions. Those are very expensive missions.

Mongabay: What was the biggest challenge in doing this?

Kevin Darras: It’s making everyone happy [laughs].

We had to be fairly flexible with what we expected from people and our criteria. Basically, we decided to trust our collaborators and it worked pretty well. Some people would struggle to provide basic metadata and would have to organize themselves and their data before being able to provide it. Others would be like, “Sure, I can send this to you in five minutes,” and then you get a huge data sheet.

Mongabay: Now that you have a fair idea of how acoustic monitoring is being used around the world, how do you think it is faring when it comes to biodiversity monitoring?

Kevin Darras: I think that the point is too often made that passive acoustic monitoring is something promising and something that has just started. Passive acoustic monitoring has been mature for some time already. It’s true that we haven’t achieved standardization or impact in terms of deployment or analysis, but we are, when using this technology, fairly efficient and effective for gathering rather comprehensive data about biodiversity. I don’t think we need to convince anyone anymore that this is useful and that this is a valid sampling method.

But I have a feeling that this message has not yet reached everyone who’s not using passive acoustic monitoring. It’s rather surprising for me to see that it hasn’t achieved the same level of standardization as what has been done with environmental DNA, when I think that the potential is just as big. Of course, it’s not comparable one to one, but it’s a sampling method that will enable us to have some great global insights.

Mongabay: How do you envision the future of Worldwide Soundscapes?

Kevin Darras: This is a project that is now becoming too big to be handled by only one person. I am soon going to have discussions with the people who want to be involved more deeply so that we have a team that is managing the Worldwide Soundscapes project.

We are going to continue integrating more and more data. We are also looking into automated ways to continue to grow the database from which we can then analyze data to answer macro-ecological questions. As of now, we have only shown the potential of the database. We still need to ask those big ecological questions and show that we can answer them with the database. We would also really like to reach those people in regions where passive acoustic monitoring has not been done yet.

One of the things we’re going to try to develop is something that we’ve tried already on a small scale within our network. To give you an example, I had a North African colleague who wanted to do passive acoustic monitoring in the Sahara and he obtained some recorders from a Polish colleague in the same network. It wasn’t even a loan. They were gifted to him and this enabled him to plug a gap in our coverage. I am hoping that we can develop the network in that sense, where we can loan equipment and provide knowledge for capacity building. It sounds ambitious, but sometimes it’s as simple as sending a postal parcel. I hope it will help expand the use of passive acoustic monitoring.

Photo by Nick Da Fonseca on Unsplash