Researchers have developed a revolutionary method to understand forest ecosystems by creating what they call a “tropical forest connectome” – borrowing from neuroscience to map how different habitat areas connect through sound rather than brain signals.
The breakthrough technology uses artificial intelligence to analyse hundreds of hours of forest recordings, revealing how information and energy flow through tropical environments via the calls of frogs, birds and insects.
Scientists deployed 17 microphones across various habitats within a Colombian oil palm plantation, capturing the acoustic signatures of different ecosystem zones over 10 days. AI analysis then identified patterns showing which forest areas function as interconnected networks.
“Instead of connections inside the brain, we were looking at the connections in the tropical forest ⎯ how information and energy flows,” said César Uribe, Louis Owen Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, who led the research.
The connectome concept reveals a striking finding: habitat type matters far more than geographic distance for ecosystem health. Two patches of intact forest produce similar acoustic signatures despite physical separation, while a natural forest and nearby oil palm plantation show completely different sound profiles.
“We were using bioacoustics data as a proxy to understand the health status of an ecosystem. The novelty here is being able to automatically identify and segment the sounds,” Uribe explained.
This acoustic mapping confirms that converting native forests to monoculture plantations drastically reduces biodiversity, while providing conservationists with a cost-effective tool for large-scale environmental monitoring.
The research represents part of broader work applying AI to ecological data, including separate studies analysing African mammal food webs using mathematical techniques that identify functionally equivalent species across different ecosystems.
“AI allows us to analyze ecological data in ways that were not possible before,” said Uribe.
Both studies appear in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, with funding from the National Science Foundation, Google and Colombian institutions.
