This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Steve Mursky.

Noise can prevent an animal from hearing other important sounds?

Rachel Buxton, a conservation biologist at Colorado State University.

Buxton and colleagues wanted to see, or rather hear,

whether sounds made by human activity called anthropogenic sound,

think airplanes, highway traffic, heavy machinery, were significant in protected areas around the country.

Park service engineers on our team

used over a million hours of acoustic measurements

taken from 492 sites around the contiguous United States and they built a sound model.

So to get at an idea of noise decibals above natural. Which translates to a doubling and 10 times increase in sound levels.

Buxton and her team determined that humans were responsible

for doubling the sound in 63% of protected areas and we raise the natural

sound levels by 10 times in 21% of such landscapes.

These levels are known to impact both the human experience in national parks and have a range of

repercussions for wildlife.

So animals use sounds for many essential life functions such as predator avoidance,

navigation, finding food, meat attraction, and maintenance of social groups.

So not being able to hear these sounds

has serious consequences.

The study is in the journal Science, which also provided the audio of Buxton.

The challenge here is managing noise sources that are coming from outside the protected area.

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