Mapping the Tourism Transportation Noise Exposure To Natural Quiet and predicting potential effects on the threatened Black-Necked Cranes in Dashanbao Protected Areas

摘要

The magnitude and distribution of anthropogenic noise have increased in the past century, causing potential threats to sound dependent animals, various ecosystems and human-beings also. Soundscape-related indicators that reflect continuous and spatially diverse measures of natural quiet and human-caused noise can be difficult to measure directly. By integrating natural soundscape and tourism transportation, we aimed to determine the noise affecting level, affecting areas and construct tourism noise map in Dashanbao protected area, Yunnan, SW China, where threatened Black-necked Cranes wintering. Then by comparation analysis, research tried to understand the potential effects of tourism noise to crane communication through a playback experiment, e.g. the spectrum and spatial overlapping of tourism noise and crane calls, then we modelled soundscape of our study area under different tourism episodes to imitate future tourism increase and predicted its potential effects on this threatened species. According this research results, tourist management strategies will be applied on this wilderness protected area, such as the limitation of private cars in protected areas, the time spending of bird watching and length of stay by private transportation. The effects of potential management alternatives can be explored proactively before being deployed in a park or protected area. Specific indicators included percentage of groups' time spent in quiet, percentage of groups experiencing an arbitrary period of natural quiet, and distance/time required to reach natural quiet from any of the trailheads studied.