What’s all that racket! Soundscapes, phenology, and biodiversity in estuaries

RESEARCH ARTICLE What’s all that racket! Soundscapes, phenology, and biodiversity in estuaries Agnieszka Monczak1,2☯, Bradshaw McKinney1, Claire Mueller1, Eric W. MontieID1☯* 1 Department of Natural Sciences, University of South Carolina Beaufort, Bluffton, South Carolina, United States of America, 2 Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, United Kingdom ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * emontie@uscb.edu Abstract There is now clear evidence that climate change affects terrestrial and marine ecosystems and can cause phenological shifts in behavior. Utilizing sound to demonstrate phenology is gaining popularity in terrestrial environments. In marine ecosystems, this technique is yet to be used due to a lack of multiyear datasets. Our study demonstrates soundscape phenology in an estuary using a six-year dataset. In this study, we showed that an increase in acoustic activity of snapping shrimp and certain fish species occurred earlier in years with warmer springs. In addition, we combined passive acoustics and traditional sampling methods (seines) and detected positive relationships between temporal patterns of the soundscape and biodiversity. This study shows that passive acoustics can provide information on the ecological response of estuaries to climate variability. Introduction Over the past decades, researchers have reported changes in the cyclic nature of migratory and breeding patterns in fauna (e.g. insects, amphibians, and birds) associated with climate change

[1–3]. It is important to monitor these shifts because the response of individual species may vary and could disrupt interactions with other species, leading to ecosystem imbalance (e.g. trophic mismatch) [4, 5]. Current advances in passive acoustic monitoring allow for long-term assessments of soundscapes, which can provide instrumental information on biological pro- cesses [6]. Long-term monitoring of sound can provide information on the timing of recurring phenomena (e.g. migration, foraging, and spawning) and can detect shifts in these biological processes [7, 8]. In marine ecosystems, there seems to be a knowledge gap in understanding soundscape phenology, simply because there are few long-term datasets. Soundscape ecology is evolving with novel technological advances, providing alternative approaches in assessing behavior as well as community structure, function, and dynamics [6]. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in assessing whether passive acoustics can cap- ture terrestrial biodiversity [e.g. 9, 10]. Applications to marine ecosystems are more challeng- ing but evidence suggests that sound diversity can reflect species diversity (i.e. measured by underwater visual census of fish) in mangrove, coral reef, seagrass, and rocky habitats [11, 12]. PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236874 September 3, 2020 1 / 18 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Monczak A, McKinney B, Mueller C, Montie EW (2020) What’s all that racket! Soundscapes, phenology, and biodiversity in

estuaries. PLoS ONE 15(9): e0236874. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236874 Editor: Heather M. Patterson, Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, AUSTRALIA Received: February 4, 2020 Accepted: July 15, 2020 Published: September 3, 2020 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236874 Copyright: © 2020 Monczak et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. The raw wav files are not part of the minimal data set but can be made available upon request.