Muskegon River Watershed

Environmental Acoustic System

Remote Environmental Assessment Laboratory

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An Overview:

Preserving and restoring ecological integrity is a major goal of managing ecosystems. In the Great Lakes region, most assessments are performed with only a few parameters, such as fish and invertebrates biotic integrity and water clarity. A Thorough study of the physical, chemical and biological health of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems is important for handling the complexity of watersheds. We are engaged in an innovative monitoring program to thoroughly study the ecological integrity of streams, lakes and wetlands within a model watershed, the Muskegon River Watershed (MRW). The assessment program includes developing response-stressor-land use models to manage watersheds and exciting new measurement systems that will engage and educate stake holders about the intrinsic value of ecosystems and how human activities affect them.

An Ecological Assessment of the Muskegon River Watershed:

In daily life, sound is an important yet often overlooked factor. While humans receive constant auditory input, most of this information goes unnoticed unless it becomes a nuisance or ceases suddenly. Unconsciously, however, sound has a dramatic impact on an individual’s emotional state and decision making. In addition to its psychological effects, we maintain that sound functions in ecology in a dual role as both an indicator of ecosystem activity, particularly when related to human disturbance, and a stressor on ecosystem function and services. In the Muskegon River Watershed, we have been gathering data from permanent recording sites, aquatic sampling activities, manual field recordings, and volunteer recordings and interpreting this data within the general framework of the Soundscape concept.

The goal of this research is to gather, interpret, analyze, and ultimately quantify acoustic information from the environment. This quantification will then be correlated to landscape analysis, remote sensing data, and land use/land cover data to develop an index of disturbance regimes for land use changes and land development.

Simultaneously, by making this information consistently available to the public in real time through the Clickable Ecosystem concept, we hope to aid in policy decisions, general understanding of ecological systems, and public education, thereby helping to develop a society that is better informed and more capable of making intelligent ecological decisions.