Dr Anna Xambó will be presenting “Sensing the Forest: Exploring Climate Change Through Soundscape Datasets from DIY Streamers at Alice Holt Forest” at the Freesound Day programme, October 28th, Barcelona and online
The programme includes a full day of talks. If you are attending remotely, all you need to do is to join this Zoom meeting room (the room will be open 15 minutes before the start of the event)
Our contribution was a presentation about the two streamers and datasets of automatic recordings. You can find below the abstract of the talk as well as the video.
Sensing the Forest: Exploring Climate Change Through Soundscape Datasets from DIY Streamers at Alice Holt Forest
In this talk, I will present the Sensing the Forest (StF) project, funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, which aims to raise awareness among forest visitors, artists, scientists, and the general public about the vital connection between forests and climate change. Specifically, I will discuss the deployment of two DIY, solar-powered, off-grid audio streamers in Alice Holt Forest, which captured year-long soundscapes as part of an effort to document environmental change. Although the streamers have now completed their mission, their legacy continues through two archived datasets on Freesound—the Natural Soundscape Dataset (12 months) and the Installation Dataset (6 months). These recordings prompt important questions: What can we learn about climate change from a year of forest soundscapes? Is this timespan sufficient to detect long-term environmental shifts? By exploring these questions, the project opens up new avenues for interdisciplinary research and public engagement.