Audrey Looby

Motivation: Fish sounds are integral to a variety of ecological functions, including reproduction, predator–prey interactions and recruitment, with ever‐growing interest in their relationships to anthropogenic impacts and applications for passive acoustic monitoring. Until recently, however, fish sound production data were often not easily accessible, limiting research, management and public awareness. FishSounds.net launched in 2021 to compile and disseminate global fish sound production information and recordings. Here, we describe the subsequent FishSounds version releases 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 3.0 and 3.1 (cumulatively referred to as Versions 2 and 3). We updated the core dataset to include any fish species studied for sound production up until the year 2023. We added over 1000 new fish sound recordings, collated from FishSounds contributors or Cornell University's Macaulay Library. Connections with FishBase and the World Register of Marine Species were strengthened to improve the species information provided on FishSounds and facilitate data sharing. We also created several interactive visualisation tools, including a dendrogram and map view, to allow users to explore trends in known fish sound production. These updates have made FishSounds now the largest catalogue of fish sound production knowledge, utilised by over 17,000 users annually and featuring 1252 fish species studied across 1013 references as well as 1304 recordings. Main Types of Variables Contained: Fish sound production information compiled from the scientific literature, representative fish sound recordings with associated metadata and supporting images and species data drawn from other repositories. Spatial Location and Grain: Global. Time Period and Grain: 1874–2023. Major Taxa and Level of Measurement: Fishes (Agnatha, Chondrichthyes, Sarcopterygii, Actinopterygii). All sound production information and most recordings have species‐level identification, with any others identified to the lowest possible taxonomic level. Software Format: The complete database is presented on FishSounds.net , with versioned image, audio, tabular and text files in a Borealis data repository.

Freshwater ecosystems are full of underwater sounds produced by amphibians, aquatic arthropods, reptiles, plants, fishes, and methane bubbles escaping from the sediment. Although much headway has been made in recent years investigating the overall soundscapes of various freshwater ecosystems around the world, there remains a significant knowledge gap in our collective inability to accurately and reliably link recorded sounds with the species that produced them. Here, we present The Freshwater Sounds Archive, a new global initiative, which seeks to address this knowledge gap by collating species-specific freshwater sound recordings into a publicly available database. By means of metadata collection, we also present a snapshot of the species studied, the recording equipment, and recording parameters used by freshwater ecoacousticians globally. In total, 61 entries were submitted to the archive between the 4th of March 2023 and the 30th of April 2025, representing 16 countries and 6 continents. The most numerous taxonomic group was arthropods (29 entries), followed by fishes (14 entries), amphibians (10 entries), macrophytes (7 entries), and a freshwater mollusk (1 entry). The majority of the submissions were from European countries (27 entries), of which the United Kingdom was the most represented with 14 entries. The next most represented region was North America (11 entries), followed by South America (8 entries), Oceania and Asia (5 entries each), Africa (3 entries), and the Middle East and Central America with 1 entry each. The global south, polar regions, and areas with an elevation >500 m (asl) were underrepresented. The field of freshwater ecoacoustics to date has largely focused on the analysis of ‘sound types’ due to a current lack of knowledge of species-specific sounds. The Freshwater Sounds Archive presents an opportunity to move beyond the ‘sound type’ approach, and towards an approach with higher taxonomic resolution, ultimately resulting in species-specific descriptions. Furthermore, The Freshwater Sounds Archive will provide freshwater ecoacousticians with one of the main tools required to start creating annotated training datasets for machine learning models from soundscape recordings by referring to known species sounds present in the archive. In the long-term, this will result in the automatic detection and classification of species-specific freshwater sounds from soundscape recordings, such as indicator, invasive, and endangered species.

Aim: The urgency for remote, reliable and scalable biodiversity monitoring amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems has sparked worldwide interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM), which can track life underwater and on land. However, we lack a unified methodology to report this sampling effort and a comprehensive overview of PAM coverage to gauge its potential as a global research and monitoring tool. To address this gap, we created the Worldwide Soundscapes project, a collaborative network and growing database comprising metadata from 416 datasets across all realms (terrestrial, marine, freshwater and subterranean).Location: Worldwide, 12,343 sites, all ecosystem types.Time Period: 1991 to present.Major Taxa Studied: All soniferous taxa.Methods: We synthesise sampling coverage across spatial, temporal and ecological scales using metadata describing sampling locations, deployment schedules, focal taxa and audio recording parameters. We explore global trends in biological, anthropogenic and geophysical sounds based on 168 selected recordings from 12 ecosystems across all realms.Results: Terrestrial sampling is spatially denser (46 sites per million square kilometre—Mkm²) than aquatic sampling (0.3 and 1.8 sites/Mkm² in oceans and fresh water) with only two subterranean datasets. Although diel and lunar cycles are well sampled across realms, only marine datasets (55%) comprehensively sample all seasons. Across the 12 ecosystems selected for exploring global acoustic trends, biological sounds showed contrasting diel patterns across ecosystems, declined with distance from the Equator, and were negatively correlated with anthropogenic sounds.Main Conclusions: PAM can inform macroecological studies as well as global conservation and phenology syntheses, but representation can be improved by expanding terrestrial taxonomic scope, sampling coverage in the high seas and subterranean ecosystems, and spatio‐temporal replication in freshwater habitats. Overall, this worldwide PAM network holds promise to support cross‐realm biodiversity research and monitoring efforts.

Active (i.e., intentional) fish sound production provides informative cues for numerous ecological functions, including larval recruitment or reproduction, and can facilitate monitoring and restoration. It is therefore important to have a holistic picture of actively soniferous tropical reef fish diversity, particularly in the face of growing threats such as noise pollution and habitat degradation. This study integrates fish biodiversity and sonifery datasets to assess the prevalence and ecological characteristics of actively soniferous tropical reef fishes. There are 258 known sound‐producing species, which span 46 families, encompass a variety of life‐history (e.g., lifespan) and distribution (e.g., depth) attributes, and include many vulnerable and commercially valuable species. Furthermore, up to 75% of tropical reef fish species are considered likely to produce active sounds. This synthesis should encourage a greater appreciation for active fish sound production in tropical reef environments and advance efforts to incorporate soundscape ecology into management and restoration strategies.

The diversity of biotic and abiotic sounds that fill underwater ecosystems has become polluted by anthropogenic noise in recent decades. Yet, there is still great uncertainty surrounding how different acoustic stimuli influence marine and freshwater (i.e., aquatic) communities. Despite capabilities to detect and produce sounds, aquatic invertebrates are among the most understudied taxa within the field of soundscape ecology. We conducted a meta‐analysis to understand how sounds from various sources influence the behavior and physiology of aquatic invertebrates. We extracted 835 data points from 46 studies conducted in 15 countries. The resulting data included 50 species, a range of experimental conditions, and four sound categories: anthropogenic, environmental, synthetic, and music. We used meta‐analytic multivariate mixed‐effect models to determine how each sound category influenced aquatic invertebrates and if responses were homogeneous across taxa. Our analyses illustrate that anthropogenic noise and synthetic sounds have detrimental impacts on aquatic invertebrate behavior and physiology, and that environmental sounds have slightly beneficial effects on their behavior. Defence responses were the most impacted behaviors, while the most prominent physiological responses were related to biochemistry, genetics, and morphology. Additionally, arthropods and molluscs exhibited the most pronounced physiological responses to anthropogenic and synthetic noise. These findings support the conclusion that many invertebrate species are sensitive to changes in aquatic soundscapes, which can cause adverse or favorable consequences to individuals and populations, dependent on the sound source. This quantitative synthesis highlights the necessity of including marine and freshwater invertebrates in acoustic exposure studies, aquatic ecosystem assessments, and emerging noise pollution policies.

FishSounds is an online portal that provides open and user-friendly access to academic scholarship regarding the sounds made by fish species. It is the result of an international collaboration between students, scientists, and information professionals, and has become a resource used around the globe for research, education, journalism, and general interest. This website is just the first instance of a new approach to sharing knowledge and an emerging cyberinfrastructure for open scholarship. The codebase behind FishSounds was designed to be reusable with other datasets, and in the coming years additional portals will connect users to knowledge from varied subject areas across academic disciplines. This discussion examines the development and reception of FishSounds as a case study for the creation of these websites, called Searchable Online Catalogues of Knowledge, or SOCKs. As it is publicly released, the SOCK platform will continue to evolve and develop new strategies based on the lessons learned from different audiences accessing FishSounds.

FishSounds (https://fishsounds.net) is an online portal that provides open and user-friendly access to academic scholarship regarding the sounds made by fish species. It is the result of an international collaboration between students, scientists, and information professionals, and has become a resource used around the globe for research, education, journalism, and general interest. This website is just the first instance of a new approach to sharing knowledge and an emerging cyberinfrastructure for open scholarship. The codebase behind FishSounds was designed to be reusable with other datasets, and in the coming years additional portals will connect users to knowledge from varied subject areas across academic disciplines. This discussion examines the development and reception of FishSounds as a case study for the creation of these websites, called Searchable Online Catalogues of Knowledge, or SOCKs. An examination of the lessons learned from different audiences accessing FishSounds will be used to guide the development of the SOCK platform as it is publicly released.