- When submitting your paper in the selected journal’s online submission system:
- Select the appropriate article type for your manuscript (see the selected journal’s Information for Contributors for details on article types).
- Select the name of this special issue (SPECIAL ISSUE ON…) in the dropdown menu for the section/category.
Climate Change: How the Sound of the Planet Reflects the Health of the Planet
Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025Contribute to this Special Topic
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) and JASA Express Letters are calling for papers for a joint Special Issue on “Climate Change: How the Sound of the Planet Reflects the Health of the Planet.”
Climate change is altering ecosystem productivity and changing how species interact with each other and with their environment. It follows that the statistical structure of auditory environments of ecosystems will also be altered on a planetwide scale. Changes in overall ambient sound levels, as well as the spectral and temporal characteristics of altered ecosystem soundscapes reflect conditions with potentially grave consequences in an acoustic ecology framework. The highly adapted/specialized acoustic communication systems of terrestrial and aquatic life forms alike may be compromised when ecosystems undergo rapid transitions and associated soundscapes will be concomitantly altered.
In this regard, there is a need for the development and application of cost-effective acoustic instrumentation scaled and designed for deployment in widely varying environmental conditions with signal processing algorithms to track and extract relevant acoustic features of the changing soundscape as our planetary system warms, oceans acidify, weather events intensify, precipitation patterns evolve, and the human enterprise is transformed. Recognizing the urgency of the climate crisis, this Special Issue invites papers investigating efforts to monitor and mitigate the environmental, economic, and social disruption threatened by an increasingly warm planet.
Please note: Accepted papers will be published in the next available regular issue of the selected journal and identified as belonging to this Special Issue. After all papers from both journals have been published for the Special Issue, they will all be listed in a joint online collection on the JASA and JASA Express Letters websites.
Topics covered include, but are not limited to:
- Long-term studies documenting shifting soundscapes as global temperatures warm
- Investigations of ethological alterations and health of aquatic and terrestrial life forms (e.g., foraging, migratory patterns, communication) resulting from climate change
- Tracking changes in ocean temperature (e.g., ocean acoustic thermometry)
- Measurements of ocean acidification
- Monitoring changing weather patterns (including precipitation)
- Studies of environmental transformations caused by climate change
- Mapping underwater methane seeps
- Effects of green energy on the soundscape (e.g., wind turbines)
- Methods to monitor the carbon cycle and assess carbon sequestration
- Novel instrumentation and signal processing algorithms for monitoring climate change
- Modeling the acoustical effects of climate change
- Acoustic methods to mitigate climate change
Guest Editors
Megan S. Ballard*
University of Texas at Austin, USA
meganb@arlut.utexas.edu
Edward J. Walsh
University of Minnesota, USA
ewalsh@umn.edu
Lauren A. Freeman
Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Newport, USA
lauren.a.freeman3.civ@us.navy.mil
Daniel T. Blumstein
University of California Los Angeles, USA
marmots@ucla.edu
Ying Tsong Lin
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, USA
ytlin@whoi.edu
*Liaison Guest Editor
Manuscript Details & Submission
Please note: although there will be a joint online collection, your paper, if accepted, will publish in the journal you chose to submit to.
- Please select the journal you will be submitting to and visit the following, where you will find the Information for Contributors for the selected journal and link to this journal’s online submission system:
- For JASA: JASA Preparing Your Manuscript page
- For JASA Express Letters: JASA Express Letters Preparing Your Manuscript page
- To ensure your submission is considered for the Special Issue, please do the following:
- In your manuscript document, before the abstract, please include the following: “This paper is part of a special issue on Climate Change: How the Sound of the Planet Reflects the Health of the Planet.”
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Submission Deadline: September 30, 2025Contribute to this Special Topic