Listening to a Forest Recover

Ecological restoration is usually photographed.

We see the same hillside before and after planting. We count trees. We measure canopy cover. We survey birds, insects and mammals.

But a recovering ecosystem can also be heard.

This is the idea behind ecoacoustics, a rapidly expanding field that uses environmental sound to study ecological systems. Researchers can leave acoustic recorders in forests, wetlands or grasslands for long periods and collect thousands of hours of sound without needing a person to stand there continuously.

What fascinates me is that this turns listening into ecological data.

A 2025 systematic review examined 187 studies using ecoacoustic approaches to understand ecosystem degradation or restoration. Passive acoustic monitoring appeared in 89 percent of the studies reviewed, with researchers studying bats, birds, amphibians, insects, mammals and entire soundscapes.¹

This is more than recording pretty birdsong.

In the Western Ghats of India, researchers used passive acoustic monitoring across mature forest, naturally regenerating areas and actively restored sites. Their recordings showed meaningful differences in the animal communities using those habitats. Rainforest bird detections were highest in mature benchmark forest, but restored areas also showed evidence of returning rainforest bird species. At the same time, gaps in higher frequency acoustic activity suggested that some insect communities had not recovered in the same way.²

That complexity is important.

If I listened casually to a restored forest and heard several birds, I might decide that nature had "returned." Ecoacoustic analysis can challenge that impression. Recovery is not one sound and it does not happen equally across species.

Researchers have even started listening below ground. A study in restored temperate forests recorded sounds produced by soil organisms and explored whether acoustic indices could help assess belowground biodiversity.³

As a musician, this changes what the word listening means to me.

Musicians are trained to separate sounds. We hear texture, density, register, repetition and silence. Ecologists use different terminology, but some of the basic questions feel surprisingly familiar.

How many voices are present?

When do they enter?

Which frequencies dominate?

Has one sound begun masking another?

What changes over time?

Of course, a forest is not an orchestra. That comparison can become romantic very quickly. Acoustic complexity does not automatically equal ecological health, and an apparently quiet habitat is not necessarily empty. Recorders also miss organisms that do not make detectable sounds. Ecoacoustic indices are tools, not magical translations of nature.

Still, I think the field offers an exciting meeting point between environmental science and musical attention.

We often talk about musicians "giving nature a voice." That phrase now feels slightly arrogant to me.

Nature was already producing sound.

Perhaps the more useful task is learning how to listen to it carefully enough to notice when something changes.

A recovering forest does not send us a written progress report.

Sometimes, it sings one.