Basic Study of the Relationship between Environmental Sounds and Green Coverage Ratios

Potential Application of Sound Monitoring to Ecosystem Evaluation

Abstract

Ecosystem evaluation in existing Environmental Impact Assessment has several issues such as time consumption, high costs, lack of quantitative evaluations and considerations of relativity between other evaluating items in EIA, and dependence on researchers' knowledge and experiences for accurate investigation results. Rapid and quantitative ecosystem evaluation is increasing in demand with the recent trends of applying rapid assessment or Environmental Assessment for ecosystem evaluation. In this study, we investigated 26 urban green areas by using automatic sound recorders to consider the application of sound to rapid ecosystem evaluation. To analyze the data, we devised new programming to calculate the proportion of natural sounds (the vocalizations of birds, amphibians, insects, and other animals) and anthropogenic sounds (cars, trains, airplanes, and other artificial device's sounds). As a result, there was a positive correlation between the proportion of natural sounds and green coverage ratios.