Some of our favorite acoustic papers from 2025!

As we close 2025, we wanted to share a few of the papers and research findings from the past year. Everything from bee's to whales to birds!

Using bird call to improve surveys

Authors with the German Department of Forest Nature Conservation used 25,000 hours of recordings to identify within the day and seasonal variation in bird presence. The authors highlight the benefit of continuous recordings as a way to capture that variation in a way that is difficult for human observers.

Using recordings to improve sustainability of alternate fuels

Researcher Schuster, Walston, and Little with the University of Nebraska used passive acoustic monitoring to tackle a unique conservation problem. Grasslands are both important habitats for birds within the American Midwest and increasingly used for producing biofuels like ethanol. The researchers found that acoustic monitoring performed better than traditional methods for detecting species which could be at-risk of population impacts from harvesting these grasslands.

Noise makes bees bad at pollinating

Botanists in Hungary published a fascinating study showing that pollinating bees were less successful at pollinating tomatoes when exposed to noise. As a result, tomato crops were less productive. We’re learning more and more about the hidden impacts of noise each year!

Figure from Varga-Szilay (2025) showing the different experimental treatments in their noise study. You can see the speaker in Panel A and Panel B.

Identifying hidden habitat for whales

And shifting to oceans, scientists from the University of Torino used acoustic sensors to discover that humpback whales were found present in Icelandic waters for 10 months of the year, suggesting the area could serve as an important habitat, forage grounds, and migration stopover for whales.

These are just a few of the papers published this year. Others focused on tropical insect choruses, orangutans, bats, fish, and more! The wide array of environments, scientific questions, and animal subjects demonstrate the importance and value of acoustic monitoring to understand and conserve our environment.

Did you have a favorite paper from 2025?