Although it is older, bioacoustics began to develop more importantly from the second half of the last 20th century, although there were already different methods to capture the sounds of nature long before.
The long-standing limitation was the enormous size of both recording and storage devices, which made field work a fairly complex task.
The transformation of bioacoustics
The existing advances in technology have made the devices little by little become smaller and smaller and today you can buy a high quality equipment for much less money than we imagine and with a really small size.
In this way, today it is possible to make recordings of the sounds of the animal world in a totally faithful way, and they can be stored and analyzed later for use in different fields of research.
Many of the bioacoustic signals that we can hear are characteristic of certain species or even individual organisms. The recording, storage and study of all recorded sounds can be very useful when studying animal communities.
Currently, animals that may be hidden among the foliage or out of reach of researchers can be identified and also studied, being able to do a job without being invasive, preserving nature and avoiding causing discomfort to animals in the environment to be studied.
Thanks to current technology and the size of the equipment, any kind of habitat can be studied, not only on land but also underwater, one of the advantages that did not exist a few years ago and that allows us to delve deeper in the knowledge of the underwater world.
Thanks to the bioacoustic data, they can be used to classify different species for a database in which all the information is found to complement it with the audio files and save more information.
To conclude, we must remember that although it is quite an advantage to complement everything that is known about animals, bioacoustics presents some problems, especially because there is no standard in terms of recording format and because equipment is obsolete. of reproduction, something that is not taken into account at the moment but must be kept in mind in the medium and long term.