Can listening to forests help us understand if the life inside them is thriving? Apparently, yes. Giacomo Delgado likens it to a doctor examining heart health. “A doctor has listened to many people’s hearts, and knows what healthy hearts sound like,” Delgado, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zürich, told Mongabay in a video interview. “She then starts to compare your heart to other heart sounds to see if you have a healthy heart.” A team of researchers, led by Delgado, has used the same logic to assess the success of a forest protection and restoration mechanism in Costa Rica. Using more than 16,000 hours of audio recordings of the forest, they found that biodiversity was restored in naturally regenerated forests. These forests were also found to sound similar to forests that have been protected for years. In 1950, half of Costa Rica was forested; by 1995, forest cover had been reduced to 25%, driven in part by cattle ranching and agriculture expansion in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, however, Costa Rica became something of a pioneer in the payment for ecosystem services (PES) system, a mechanism where landowners and local communities are financially compensated for protecting and preserving forests. The country’s PES initiative, launched in 1997, is one of the first national-level programs of its kind in the world, and to date has covered more than 1.3 million hectares (3.2 million acres). “Costa Rica’s PES program is notable not only for its…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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