Bioacoustics as a Tool for Data Exploration

Bioacoustics is uniquely suited as a tool for teachers and students to build high-quality, open-ended, inquiry-driven studies. The large-data nature of capturing soundscapes is made simple to work with by elegant programs such as the SoundEcology package in the free software environment “R,” and the data cheap to collect by low-cost audio recorders such as AudioMoths. Here we give an example by working with high school students to calculate acoustic indices, run simple statistical analysis, work with large data files, code, visualize data, and use these skills to answer their own novel scientific questions.