Purdue University professor Bryan Pijanowski’s research team will be working in some wild and remote places around the globe in the coming year. Pijanowski’s sound-source surveyors will be equipped with microphones, headphones and parabolic reflectors to efficiently collect sound waves from the natural world. Their tools also include low-flying drones and sensors mounted on orbiting satellites and the International Space Station. The Purdue team is utilizing these resources to develop a global model of animal and plant diversity and how it changes. They will also access Purdue’s two crown jewels of global biodiversity databases. One is the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative, a database that holds tree species inventories from more than a million plots of land. The other database, at the Center for Global Soundscapes, contains more than 4 million audio recordings from most ecosystems on Earth. “We’re using acoustic remote sensing to develop the animal biodiversity model,” said Pijanowski, center director and professor in the College of Agriculture’s Department of Forestry and Natural Resources. He has, for example, maintained an acoustic sensor in the wetlands of the Purdue Wildlife Area since 2007. And from the Southeast Asian island of Borneo alone, he has more than 25,00 recordings that include sounds from 3,000 animal species.