Anne Axel

Assistant Professor at Marshall University,  Department of Biological Sciences

Anne Axel is an Assistant Professor at Marshall University located on the Ohio River in the heart of Appalachia. As a landscape ecologist, Anne studies the impacts of disturbance on biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes using remote sensing technologies. Anne was first captivated by pattern in tropical rain forest landscapes which led her to map the spatial distribution and density of lemurs in Madagascar.  A decade ago, a visit to the tropical dry forest changed the course of her research; she now strives to understand how we might manage tropical dry forests as both a resource for humans, as well as a refuge for extraordinary biodiversity.

Ecoacoustic analyses have allowed Anne to better understand how differences in dry forest pattern, driven by human disturbance, are reflected in dry forest ecology. She combines ecoacoustic recordings with livestock movement data, lemur density estimates, and satellite images to map spatial patterns of biodiversity and disturbance. Anne collects ecoacoustic data at temporal scales greater than a year to capture both diurnal and seasonal cycles, and she is exploring new methods of detecting phenological signals from these data. Her research also focuses on statistically-appropriate methods to handle temporal autocorrelation in long-term datasets.

Anne also collects long-term soundscape data from forests embedded in energy landscapes, the forest and water of a protected mangrove reserve, and a dry forest recovering from a stand-clearing fire.

Anne’s recent soundscape research is supported by the NASA West Virginia Space Grant Consortium. As a graduate student her research was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship. Before moving to Marshall University, Anne held a teaching lectureship at the University of Michigan. Anne holds a Ph.D. in ecology and wildlife biology from Michigan State University. She received a Master of Forest Science from Yale University and a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies from the University of Delaware.

 

Eddie Game 

Lead Scientist, The Nature Conservancy

Eddie Game is the Lead Scientist for The Nature Conservancy’s Asia Pacific region, responsible for ensuring that the Conservancy remains a world leader in making science-based conservation decisions. Eddie has had the privilege of working on conservation in over 20 countries, helping to apply innovative methods to projects as diverse as community protected areas in Melanesia, grazing management in northern Kenya, snow leopard conservation in Mongolia, forestry in Indonesia, and catchment restoration in Colombia. Eddie and his team have been enthusiastic adopters of ecoacoustics, developing partnerships that bring together cutting-edge academic research with real-world applications in countries including, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Myanmar, Australia, and Gabon. For his work on the application of soundscapes to tropical forest management he was shortlisted for the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award. 

He has published more than 50 papers on aspects of conservation science, and his first book, Conservation Planning: Informed Decisions for a Healthier Planet, co-authored Craig Groves, was published in 2015. Eddie is currently Editor-in-Chief of the leading conservation journal Conservation Letters. For his work on how climate change data can be used in decision making he was the recipient of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation’s inaugural prize for innovative concepts to conserve the reef in the face of climate change. Eddie received his PhD in marine conservation and decision science from the University of Queensland, and holds an adjunct faculty position there.

 

David Monacchi

David Monacchi (1970) is an eco-acoustics researcher, composer and interdisciplinary artist. He has been developing the project Fragments of Extinction for 15 years, conducting field research in the world’s remaining areas of undisturbed primary equatorial forest. The recipient of multiple awards throughout Europe and North America, Monacchi is pioneering a new compositional and science dissemination approach based on 3D soundscape recordings of ecosystems to foster discourse on the biodiversity crisis through science-based sound art. His Eco-acoustic Theatre invention (a full-periphonic space dedicated to soundscape listening) has received the international patent in 2014 and is now being built in museums and public spaces. He has worked for 25 years in cross-disciplinary contexts and produced works for contemporary music, art installation, cinema, video-art, site-specific public art, natural history, science and contemporary art museums, and is founding member of several artistic and scientific networks. A research fellow at Simon Fraser University – Vancouver (CA) in 1998 and a Fulbright scholar at University of California, Berkeley (USA) in 2007, Monacchi has taught at the University of Macerata (IT) since 2000, and is now professor of Electroacoustics at the Conservatorio “G. Rossini” of Pesaro (IT). The documentary film “Dusk Chorus – based on Fragments of Extinction” is now receiving awards in environmental and science film festivals throughout the world. A TEDx speaker in 2017, Monacchi is the recipient of the Artistic Research Residency 2018 at IRCAM (Paris).

Web: www.fragmentsofextinction.org

Ros Bandt

Dr Ros Bandt is an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary sound artist and researcher who has forged a unique career profiling sound as primary material for creativity and knowledge transfer. An award winning temporal designer, multi-instrumentalist and curator of acoustic spaces she is at once composer, installation artist, performer, author and curator. Her original sound works and writings have challenged the hegemony of the eye over the ear. Since 1985 she has designed fluid multichannel sound installations which provide new listening opportunities to reconsider acoustic spaces and sonic relationships.

She was awarded the The Cochrane Smith Award for Sound Heritage from the National Film and Sound Archive in 2012 and won the sound art Australia prize for her electroacoustic radiophonic piece Mungo, derived from her 106 string aeolian harps sound sculpture installed at Lake Mungo. She was the first woman to win the Don Banks Composers Award in 1991 and was awarded the inaugural Benjamin Cohen Peace Prize in the USA. Her work endorses the ancient ideas of the sung country and sound as the dominant means of knowing in Australian knowledge practices, asking questions: How is Australia’s soundscape changing, ecologically, socially and culturally? How are we contributing to these changes, wittingly and unwittingly? How are the sonic interventions made? Who are the scientific and creative players? Her three Australian Research Council Linkage Grants have interrogated these relationships and research questions over the last two decades.

Ros Bandt is a founding member of the World Forum of Acoustic Ecology and lives between Athens, her North Fitzroy studio and her 55 acre acoustic sanctuary in regional Victoria where her aeolian harps sing country. She founded the acoustic sanctuary to ask the question; what does the land tell us through listening to the seasons?

 

Craig Radford

Associate Professor. Marine science and physiology, University of Auckland

Craig Radford work focuses on the noises of New Zealand reefs and how larval animals (such as crabs) find their way to suitable reef habitats for settlement. Within this theme, he is investigating how far sound can travel and be detected under water, the limits of hearing for animals such as shrimp and the role of kina in producing reef noise.

Craig attended Melville High School in Hamilton, then the University of Waikato where he obtained his BSc in Marine Science. From there, he went to the University of Canterbury where he obtained his MSc (Hons) in Zoology and conducted research on the physiology of the New Zealand rock lobster.

Following this, Craig took up a position at Massey University working as a research technician for the Animal Health Services Centre. After working there for a year, he decided to undertake his PhD at Auckland University, researching the effects of underwater sound on marine larvae. Following completion of his PhD, he was successful in securing his current position, continuing the research he started as a PhD student. A teacher, the late Christina Phillips, was instrumental in stimulating Craig’s enthusiasm for biology in general, and it was his love for all things to do with the sea that stimulated his interest in marine biology.

In 2008, Craig was awarded runner-up in the prestigious MacDiarmid Young Scientist of the Year Award for his PhD research. 2009 was another big year for Craig where he was awarded a Canadian Commonwealth Post-Doctorial Fellowship, which he turned down because he was awarded both a Te Tipu Pūtaiao Fellowship and obtained a Marsden Fast-Start award to continue his research here in New Zealand.

Currently, his main research focus is assessing the use of underwater sound as a tool for monitoring diversity and ecosystem health.

What Craig loves most about science is that it is fun and for every question that is answered, another 10 are created. He also enjoys travel, which gets him to some exotic places around the world.

Craig’s publications are listed here.

 

Michael Towsey

Research Scientist,  Ecoacoustics Research Team – Queensland University of Technology

Dr Michael Towsey has held research positions at Queensland University of Technology since 1997. He uses machine learning methods to solve biological problems. These have ranged from the sublime (analysis of bird song) to the ridiculous (analysis of milk yield in cow herds). In between there was some bioinformatics. Michael is currently in the Ecoacoustics Research Group within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at QUT. He works on the ‘big data’ problems associated with long duration recordings of the environment, in particular, visualisation of long duration recordings to assist navigation, and construction of automated recognizers for species of interest, such as the koala, the New Zealand kiwi and the cane toad.

Michael’s publications are listed here