Sound is an inherent component of the environment that provides conditions and information necessary for many animal activities. Soniferous species require specific acoustic and physical conditions suitable for their signals to be transmitted, received, and effectively interpreted to successfully identify and utilize resources in their environment and interact with conspecifics and other heterospecific organisms. We propose the Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis to explain how the acoustic environment influences habitat selection of sound-dependent species. We postulate that sound-dependent species select and occupy habitats (...) with unique acoustic characteristics that are essential to their functional needs and conducive to the threshold of sound frequency they produce and detect. These acoustic habitats are based on the composition of biophony, geophony, and technophony in the soundscape and on the biosemiotics mechanisms described in the eco-field hypothesis. The Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis initiates questions of habitat selection that go beyond the physical attributes of the environment by applying ecoacoustics theory. We outline the theoretical basis of the Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis and provide examples from the literature to support its assumptions. The concept of acoustic habitats has been documented in the literature for many years but here, we accurately and extensively define acoustic habitat and we put this concept into a unified theory. We also include perspectives on how the Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis can stimulate a paradigm shift in conservation strategies for threatened and endangered species. (shrink)

Acoustic codes assure the intra and interspecific communication of vocal animals. They are composed by a sequence of nominal entities and by magnitude modulation confirming in such a way contemporarily a behavioural and ecological nature. The acoustic codes find evidence in the acoustic niche hypothesis by which species in order to reduce interspecific competition occupy a restricted portion of the available frequencies modulating very precise acoustic cues . Their evolution, like other aspect of biology, is under control of the environmental (...) conditions assuming the more favourable configurations. These nominal entities respond also to the amount of energy by which are emitted allowing to the eavesdropping individuals to range the distance at which a potential competitor is broadcasting a signal. Environmental alterations, especially if of anthropogenic origin, can produce severe consequence of the acoustic codes that in turn may affect the prey–predator balance and the complexity of communities. In fact acoustic codes under an environmental constraint like human noise intrusion can be modified in order to reduce a masking effect, demonstrating their phenological plasticity. The new ecological discipline of soundscape ecology offers the possibility to investigate the nature and the evolution of the acoustic codes in different environmental conditions. (shrink)

Describing resources and their relationships with organisms seems to be a useful approach to a ‘unified ecology’, contributing to fill the gap between natural and human oriented processes, and opening new perspectives in dealing with biological complexity. This Resource Criterion defines the main properties of resources, describes the mechanisms that link them to individual species, and gives a particular emphasis to the biosemiotic approach that allows resources to be identified inside a heterogeneous ecological medium adopting the eco-field model. In particular, (...) this Criterion allows to couple matter, structured energy and information composing the ecological systems to the biosemiotic and cognitive mechanisms adopted by individual species to track resources, transforming neutral surroundings into meaningful species-specific Umwelten. The expansion of the human semiotic niche that is a relevant evolutionary process of the present time, assigns the role of powerful and efficient agency to the Resources Criterion to evaluate the effect of human intrusion into the natural systems with habits of key stone species, under the challenge of a growing use of alloctonous, immaterial and symbolic resources of the actual globalized societal models. The Resource Criterion interprets the ecological dynamics contributing to complete the epistemology of the ecology, to open a bridge toward economy and other societal sciences, and to contribute to formulate a General Theory of Resources. (shrink)

We propose here to clarify some of the relations existing between information and meaning by showing how meaningful information can be generated by a system submitted to a constraint. We build up definitions and properties for meaningful information, a meaning generator system and the domain of efficiency of a meaning (to cover cases of meaningful information transmission). Basic notions of information processing are used.