Alejandro Velez Melendez
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Noise from traffic, cities and other human activity has risen sharply and is now a major form of pollution. For animals that communicate by sound, noise can make it hard to detect and recognize calls.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Neuroscience
Biology
- Topics
anthropogenic noise
noise pollution
acoustic communication
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Characterize the soundscapes and mating calls of Pacific chorus frog populations living with low and high levels of natural and human-made noise across urban and rural San Francisco Bay Area sites.
- Determine how auditory processing abilities of Pacific chorus frogs vary among populations living in different soundscapes, testing whether hearing changes in ways that aid signal reception.
- Test how variation in calls and hearing among populations affects sound-based mating behavior, such as females' ability to recognize calls in noise.
- Examine whether differences in ear anatomy underlie population-level differences in hearing between urban and rural frogs.
More about the research
Studies have shown that some city animals change their calls to cope. Whether their hearing also adapts to noise is not known. This project tests the hypothesis that hearing varies across populations living with different amounts of natural and human-made noise, in ways that help animals receive signals.
Why it matters
Understanding whether animals' hearing adapts to noise pollution could inform conservation planning and how cities are built near wildlife. Insights into how hearing copes with background noise may also guide the design of communication devices that interact with people.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Clinton Francis
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether noise and light pollution consistently favor a similar set of traits across six songbird species that differ in life history and tolerance of humans.
Paul Forlano
CUNY Brooklyn College, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether sex steroids and melatonin regulate the inner ear's dopamine system by manipulating hormone levels in plainfin midshipman fish and measuring dopamine innervation and receptor gene expression.
Diego Sustaita
California State University-San Marcos, CA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Measure biting, climbing and swimming performance of the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse and co-occurring wetland rodents in the laboratory using kinematic (motion) analyses.
The school
University of Tennessee-Knoxville: 16 labs on PI Pages, $387M a year on research, 426 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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