The Spatiotemporal Variability Of Natural Soundscape Impacted By Urban Roads

Soundscape is the acoustic element of landscape and shows the dynamic acoustic features of landscape. Though the soundscape is becoming a hotspot of ecology science research, the geo-spatial patterns, systematical functions, dynamics and change and their interactions of the soundscape have been merely studied. The research on anthropogenic impacts on soundscape therefore can not only fill the gaps in soundscape study, but also help us to build a health acoustic environment for life quality improvement.Based on the reviews of soundscape definitions and its analytical methods, the soundscape index was chosen to study the spatiotemporal variability of botanic gardens’ natural soundscape impacted by urban roads. Through filed investigations, Hangzhou Botanic Garden and its neighboring YuGu Road were selected as the study site and Yugu Road is the main impact on the Garden.By continues-time sound sampling in the study site, three key index, namely ACI, AEI, NDSI and the intermediative variable were analyzed to find the spatiotemporal variability of the anthropogenic-influenced soundscape in Hangzhou Botanic Garden. Base on the temporal and spatial change of the indices, the soundscape feature can be detected. The correlation analysis between the acoustic event and indices was used, thus the NDSI and AEI were varified to be effective and the range of ACI’s application need to be clarified with more experiments. The correlation analysis between the key indice and their geo-information were also computed to find that the road traffic affect the botanic garden’s soundscape continuously can be as far as 160m and the instantaneously affection can be 300m. Finally, the weather data were used to validate the effectiveness of the soundscape indices, and normally the indice were proved to be useless in raining days.In the last part, the limitations of this study were explained and the directions of future soundscape research were proposed, the soundscape devices were suggested to be used in the different aera and the sampling method can be developed. These may provide important implications for future soundscape studies.