Saturday I'm going to make a brief, informal presentation at a
seminar with the National Park Service about sound pollution in
parks. Here's the Nature Sound Society's announcement:
*** start quote (from http://www.naturesounds.org/announcement.html)
Saturday, April 26, 2003
9 AM - 4 PM
Natural Quiet Symposium
Bldg. T989, Fort Point (near the anchorage of the Golden Gate
Bridge), San Francisco, CA
A meeting of organizations interested in preserving natural quiet,
including the National Park Service, Wild Sanctuary, and the Nature
Sounds Society. Topics include:
- Soundscape Management: More than Noise Management
- Measures of Geography, Level and Interval
- Data Collection Protocols
- Natural Quiet: A Protected Resource
- Education and Outreach
- Grass Roots and Grass Tops: Building a Coordinated Approach
Special guests include Dr. Stuart Gage of Michigan State University
and Bernie Krause of Wild Sanctuary. Attendance by special
arrangement; contact for further information
or call (510) 238-7482.
Sunday, April 27, 2003
9 AM - 1 PM
Natural Quiet Data Analysis
Bldg. T989, Fort Point (near the anchorage of the Golden Gate
Bridge), San Francisco, CA
Dr. Stuart Gage of Michigan State University will give a workshop in
data analysis for natural quiet sound research protocols. Contact
or (510) 238-7482 for further information.
*** end quote
Currently the park service has acknowledged natural quiet as a value
in parks, and a few parks have established guidelines. Surveys are
underway in parks that have air tours, but the scientific work is
very expensive, and funds are vanishing. My role is to propose
alternative solutions using volunteers. I believe volunteers can do
good science, too.
Here's what I'm going to run up the flagpole. I'm going to sketch out
an idea for volunteers to make audio surveys of -all- national parks.
It goes like this:
1) A small committee (three PhDs?) of academically-qualified
bio-acousticians designs a sampling protocol for surveying the sound
environment. This would be a grid spanning over the ecological
regions of each park (locally determined), the seasons (by the
month?), and times of day.
2) A national web site would be established whose editors would
accept documented samples following the protocol. This would include
uncalibrated samples that the recordists would rate as percent of
undisturbed time, and calibrated samples that could produce, in
addition, measured SPLs (Note 1). The recordings would be made at
specified times and places, and would include whatever disturbing
noises were present. Multiple samples could be accepted for each slot.
A public library of documented samples would be built up. Each park
would have pages with "fill in the blanks" for all the sample slots
needed. All the recordings would be public domain and available to
the public on the web in a quality compressed format, with credit to
the recordist. Eventually you could find, say, a meadow in Yosemite
Valley in April mid-morning, a ten-minute sample. Recordists could
check the site to see what slots were empty in areas that they live
near, or plan to visit. It would generate a lot of good excuses to
visit new places. Producers of park interpretive materials could draw
on the library for examples. The Park Service could use the survey
material to document before and after management changes, like
opening or closing a road or changes in flight routes.
Call me crazy, but that's my vision. Suggestions welcome.
-Dan Dugan
Note 1: Some amateur equipment is capable of being accurately
calibrated; consumer MD recorders, for example, have repeatable
stepped input gains. A calibration workshop could travel around the
country and certify calibration of volunteers' systems (mike and
recorder combinations).
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