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Full catalog/Acoustic_Data_Cape_Floristic_2372
Acoustic_Data_Cape_Floristic_2372·v1·dataset

Nature sound recordings from South Africa (2023)

BioSCape: BioSoundSCape Acoustic Recordings, South Africa, 2023
biosphere NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 0 multiple
In plain English

What it measures. In-the-field sound recordings from across South Africa's Greater Cape Floristic Region in 2023, capturing wildlife calls (birds, frogs, insects), human-made noise, and natural sounds like wind and rain.

How it's made. Recorded by small AudioMoth audio recorders placed at hundreds of ground sites, sampling one minute out of every ten across day and night, as part of NASA's BioSCape project.

How & where you'd use it. Lets researchers link the richness of natural soundscapes to satellite and airborne imagery, supporting studies of biodiversity and ecosystem health.

What's measured

BIOSPHERE › ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS › COMMUNITY DYNAMICS

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2023-06-05 → 2023-12-16
  • Measured byData Collections (Passive Acoustic Recorder)
  • Processing levelLevel 0
  • Spatial extent18.012, -34.816, 23.9156, -31.366
  • Formatsmultiple
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Map vegetation, forests and biomass
  • Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
  • Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description

This dataset holds in situ sound recordings from sites in Greater Cape Floristic Region (GCFR), South Africa from June to December 2023. The recordings were collected as part of the Biodiversity Survey of the Cape (BioSCape) project, a multi-agency, NASA-led research project that integrates airborne imaging spectroscopy and lidar with a suite of measurements of biodiversity. BioSoundSCape is a BioSCape subproject seeking to relate ground-based measures of bioacoustic diversity to remote imagery. AudioMoth recorders were deployed at sites for 4 to 10 days of data collection (median = 7), and programmed to record 1 min of every 10, thus providing temporal sampling through day and night. Each recording was saved in a waveform audio file format with 16-bit digitization depth and a 48 kHz sampling rate. The recordings contain a wide range of environmental sounds such as biophony (e.g., birds, frogs, insects), anthropophony (e.g,. automobiles, airplanes) and geophony (e.g,. wind, rain). Sampling locations were stratified with respect to elevation, broad land use/land cover types, and time since wildfire disturbance. Most sites were within protected fynbos and Afromontane forest ecosystems. There were 505 sites in the wet season and 489 sites in the dry season, with most sites co-located between seasons. All sites were located within AVIRIS-NG hyperspectral acquisitions and 61% of sites were in LVIS lidar acquisitions. The dataset includes site information in tabular form and photographs of field sites.

Get the data

acoustic_data_cape_floristic_2372_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="Acoustic_Data_Cape_Floristic_2372",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from ORNL_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.