The Forest, for the Record

The trouble with ecological loss is that it tends to remove its own witnesses. By the time a place sounds quiet enough to alarm us, quiet may already feel normal.

A child grows up beside a river with fewer fish than it held a generation earlier and calls it normal. A young biologist begins work in a forest that has already lost half its species and calls it a baseline. The change may be measurable. The memory of what came before is not always so cooperative.

The marine biologist Daniel Pauly gave this problem a name in 1995: shifting baseline syndrome. Each generation inherits a slightly diminished natural world, then mistakes the condition in which it found that world for the condition in which it began. The baseline moves. Our expectations politely move with it.

A new study in Global Change Biology is attempting to pin one part of that baseline down.

The Soundscape Baselines Project, led by forest ecologist Zuzana Buřivalová and an international network of local scientists, conservation practitioners, community members, and Indigenous partners, has begun building a permanent acoustic record of some of the world’s remaining intact forests.

The first phase spans six places: Andulau Forest Reserve in Brunei; Tiputini Research Station in Ecuador; Ibola Dja Bana Ba Massaha in Gabon; Bavarian Forest National Park in Germany; Manu Biological Station in Peru; and the Baraboo Hills in Wisconsin.

At each location, six recorders were placed at separate sites and left to listen continuously. 24 hours a day, for at least 365 days. Camera traps watched nearby. Local teams returned each month to change batteries, collect memory cards, and keep the long act of attention going.

The project defines an intact forest as one with minimal human influence, including no commercial timber extraction for at least forty years. That does not make these places untouched. Few places are. It makes them reference points: living examples of what a relatively complete forest sounds like across dawns, storms, migrations, dry spells, insect seasons, and all the less cinematic hours between them.

This matters because trees are easier to count than absences.

Satellites can show whether a canopy remains. Cameras can document animals that pass in front of them. A microphone captures a different layer of the place: birds, frogs, insects, mammals, rain, wind, branchfall, engines, aircraft…every audible participant, whether or not a researcher already knows its name.

That last part may be the most important. The scientists do not need to identify every sound today in order to preserve it. Bioacoustic tools are still developing, and many species remain difficult to recognize by call alone. The recordings can be revisited as the science improves. A voice that is anonymous now may become legible years from now.

It is a time capsule designed to become more informative with age.

The project’s early analyses found that the intact forests carried distinctive acoustic signatures, with recognizable daily patterns shared across sites in the same forest. They also found a useful warning for anyone tempted to reduce a living system to one tidy score: time of day matters.

Broad averages can make two forests appear similar while concealing meaningful differences in how their sound rises, falls, and reorganizes over twenty-four hours.

Even a forest can disappear inside a spreadsheet.

Conservation has spent decades making nature legible to systems that prefer numbers: hectares protected, carbon stored, species counted, credits issued. These measures are necessary. They are also incomplete.

A forest can remain green from above while becoming simpler below the canopy. Without a reliable reference, a restoration project may be compared with another diminished place and still look like success.

An acoustic baseline gives the comparison somewhere honest to begin.

For WILDSOUND, the idea feels familiar. A recording from a named place, made at a particular moment and preserved with its context, is more than an appealing sound. It is a document. Remove the source and it becomes ambience. Preserve the source and it can carry memory.

This is why “forest” is never quite enough. The sound of Manu belongs to Manu. The sound of Tiputini belongs to Tiputini. Each place has its own arrangements, repetitions, interruptions, and silences. To flatten them into a category is to discard some of the information that makes them worth hearing in the first place.

A recording cannot protect a forest by itself. Neither can a photograph, a map, or a scientific paper. But it can protect something conservation needs before meaningful action is possible: an honest memory of what was there.

Sometimes the first thing a place loses is not a species. It is our ability to notice that the species has gone.

The forest is being put on the record. We should listen while the witnesses are still speaking.

Sources

• Buřivalová, Z. et al. (2026). “Bioacoustic Baselines for Intact Forests.”Global Change Biology, 32(5).

• Soundscape Baselines Project, Sound Forest Lab, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

• Pauly, D. (1995). “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries.”Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 10(10), 430.

Acoustic Ecology

There's a field of science devoted to the sounds of wild places—what they contain, what we lose when they change, and what it means to truly hear them.

In 1969, a Canadian composer named R. Murray Schafer introduced an idea that was simple enough to seem obvious and radical enough to take decades to absorb: that sound is an environment, and that the health of a place can be heard.

He called this acoustic ecology. The study of the relationship between living organisms—humans, animals, ecosystems—and the soundscapes they inhabit. Schafer believed that the sounds of a place contain information about it. That a healthy forest sounds different from a degraded one. That rivers have acoustic signatures. That the way we listen, and what we choose to listen to, reflects and shapes our relationship to the natural world.

Fifty-plus years later, the field has expanded into a formal science, with researchers like Bernie Krause—who has spent decades recording wild places and cataloguing the acoustic impact of habitat loss—building the evidence that Schafer intuited. Krause's recordings of Lincoln Meadow in California's Sierra Nevada, taken before and after selective logging in 1988, became one of the field's most cited demonstrations: the forest looked the same before and after. On tape, it had gone nearly silent.

The central insight of acoustic ecology is one that takes a moment to fully land: soundscapes are data. They are not just pleasant backgrounds or mood modifiers—they are real-time evidence of ecological health. A dawn chorus rich with overlapping species is a different thing, scientifically and experientially, from a simplified soundscape with fewer layers. The difference between them is the difference between a thriving system and a diminished one.

Krause formalized this into what he calls the three-part architecture of natural soundscapes: geophony (non-biological sounds—wind, water, rain), biophony (the sounds of living organisms—insects, birds, frogs, mammals), and anthrophony (sounds produced by humans). In a healthy ecosystem, these layers coexist in something close to acoustic cooperation. Species have evolved to occupy different frequency bands, different times of day, different sonic niches. When that balance is disrupted—by development, by logging, by climate-driven species loss—the soundscape collapses inward.

This is not a metaphor. You can hear it.

What does this mean for how we listen?

It means that a field recording from a named wild place is not just an audio file. It is a document. When WILDSOUND records the dawn sounds of Manu National Park in Peru—1.7 million hectares spanning lowland rainforest, cloud forest, and Andean grassland, home to over 1,000 bird species and one of the densest concentrations of life on earth—what you're hearing is a bioacoustic portrait of one of the most ecologically intact systems left on the planet. That information is in the sound. The complexity, the layering, the presence of species that don't exist anywhere else.

Hearing it as "jungle sounds" is like standing in front of a Velázquez and seeing "an old painting."

Acoustic ecology also offers a framework for understanding what is at stake when wild soundscapes disappear. This is not only an aesthetic loss, though it is that. It is an informational one. As species vanish and habitats simplify, the soundscapes they produced—soundscapes that took thousands of years of co-evolution to compose—disappear with them. Unlike visual records or written documentation, they cannot be reconstructed from memory. They existed in real time, in real places, and when those places change beyond recovery, the sounds do too.

Schafer called this the "lo-fi soundscape problem"—environments so saturated with human-generated noise that the detail of the natural world becomes inaudible. He was describing cities, but the concept extends further. We've created a lo-fi culture of nature listening: high volume, low resolution, no source. Rain tracks with no rain. Forest sounds with no forest behind them.

The antidote is not complicated. It is what acoustic ecology has always proposed: listen with attention. Listen to specific places. Know what you're hearing and why it sounds the way it does. Understand that the sounds of wild places are not content—they are conditions, and conditions change.

WILDSOUND was built in the spirit of that proposition. Each soundscape in the library is a named place with a real acoustic identity—the geophony of Vatnajökull's glacial rivers in Iceland, the biophony of Sinharaja Forest Reserve in Sri Lanka, whose 36,000 hectares shelter over 60 percent of the island's endemic species. These are not interchangeable. They are specific. And their specificity is what makes them worth protecting.

The field of acoustic ecology has spent fifty years making the case that how we listen matters. WILDSOUND is, in its way, an attempt to put that case into practice.

R. Murray Schafer once wrote that "a person can be educated in three ways: the ear, the eye, and the hand." He thought the ear had been neglected for most of recorded history. He spent his life trying to correct that.

The sounds are still out there. Most of them, for now. The question is whether we're actually listening.