My BEAT journey so far
By Sui Heon, Kuamut Rainforest Conservation Team
On a field excursion some time ago, I was asked to sit quietly on the forest floor with a pair of binoculars and a pen at 5 pm. My task was to record the number of animals I observed and heard over 25 minutes at a single spot. To my surprise, I only spotted three bird species and four insects, but I heard at least five species of birds and many distinct insect calls. It was at that moment I realized that, in all the years of camera trapping and live trapping, we were probably underestimating species detection in the rainforest. We hear so much more than we see in the dense forest. There are so many more species we have missed, as they are up in the canopy or out of the camera’s or cage’s field of view.
This realization sparked my interest in learning bioacoustics. With the BEAT programme, I am using collected acoustic data (24-hour recordings) from the Kuamut Rainforest Conservation Project, located in Kinabatangan, Sabah, to generate general soundscape patterns of a twice-logged tropical rainforest in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, and to evaluate the presence or absence of species in the landscape.
When I first started in the BEAT programme, I only had very basic knowledge about the functions and purposes of an acoustic recorder. Processing raw images and looking at spectrograms were daunting and abstract to me. However, as the BEAT programme progressed, I began to enjoy loading my raw files and exploring the sounds, I could pick out on the spectrogram at various sampling points. Looking at the acoustic signals feels almost like I am reading musical notes and gaining an insight into the animal community in the Kuamut forest. Not only have I started learning bioacoustics, but I also found a new community. The BEAT community is an enthusiastic and supportive group, providing mentorship with the technical aspects of bioacoustics and its deployment, as well as general advice on running a research project and fine-tuning research methods.
