CANBERRA, Jan. 19 (Xinhua) -- An international team led by Australian researchers is calling for a global effort to monitor the planet's health by "listening" underground, through a new approach known as soil ecoacoustics.
In a review published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, scientists describe soil ecoacoustics as a method that uses sound and ground-borne vibrations to detect life below the surface and ecological processes with minimal disturbance, said a statement of Australia's National Environmental Science Program (NESP) Resilient Landscapes Hub on Monday.
Sound-based monitoring could revolutionize the way ecosystems are assessed, said Jake Robinson, a microbial ecologist at Australia's Flinders University, co-author of the study, which is part of a NESP Resilient Landscapes Hub project.
"Healthy soils underpin food security, carbon storage and climate resilience, yet below-ground biodiversity is notoriously difficult to monitor," Robinson said.
With up to 75 percent of the world's soils already degraded, sound-based monitoring could help land managers and communities track ecosystem change more effectively, he said, adding that studies had shown soil ecoacoustics worked across tropical forests, woodlands, agricultural fields and arid systems.
Soil ecoacoustics captures tiny vibrations and sounds produced by organisms such as earthworms, beetle larvae, ants and termites as they move, feed or communicate, alongside water movement and cracking soils, creating "soil soundscapes" that reveal ecosystem activity and recovery through a minimally invasive, scalable method, researchers said.
The study highlights technical challenges such as understanding how sound moves through different types of soils and distinguishing living sounds from non-living ones.
Researchers are urging the creation of a global soil ecoacoustics research network and open-source standard operating procedures to enable reliable comparisons across different sites, supporting global restoration and sustainability efforts. ■