The City of Dortmund and TU Dortmund University are collaborating on an innovative research project aimed at characterizing proposed quiet areas in Dortmund. The research project supports the formal instrument "Noise Action Plan", which is required for all urban regions by EU law and anchored in the German spatial planning system by the Federal Immission Control Act (BImSchG §47).

The data collection and analysis methods follow protocols developed in the successful SALVE pilot project (Haselhoff et al., 2021; Lawrence et al., 2022), in which temporally longitudinal sound data are collected at 72 sites over a six-month period and subsequently analyzed using a suite of ecoacoustic indices (Sueur, 2018) and the SPL measure LAeq. The upcoming Dortmund noise action plan (expected to be completed by 2024) will be the first formal noise action plan in Germany to use robust sound data collection and analysis to designate quiet areas in a German noise action plan.

Research Questions:

• What is the biophonic index in different (potentially) quiet areas in the Dortmund urban area?
• At which (ambient) noise levels are biophonic sounds dominant in different areas?
• How do daily acoustic patterns differ between all sample sites?
• What is the spatial distribution of high-quality quiet areas in the city DO and who has the most access?
• What is the influence of green infrastructure on biophonic distribution in urban DO?

Project Details:

Project duration: May 15, 2022 to February 21, 2023.

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Dietwald Gruehn

Project Manager: Dr. Ing. Bryce T. Lawrence

Contact person:

• Dr. Ing. Bryce T. Lawrence(bryce.lawrencetu-dortmundde), TU Dortmund University, Department of Spatial Planning, Research Group Landscape Ecology and Landscape Planning
• Andreas Fruecht(afruechtstadtdode), City of Dortmund, Environmental Office, Immission Control Department.

Sponsor: City of Dortmund, Germany

Literature:

Haselhoff, T., Lawrence, B., Hornberg, J., Ahmed, S., Sutcliffe, R., Gruehn, D. & Moebus, S. (2021): The acoustic quality and health in urban environments (SALVE) project: study design, rationale and methodology. In: Applied Acoustics 188 (2022) 108538; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2021.108538 .

Lawrence, B., Sutcliffe, R., Hornberg, J., Haselhoff, T., Ahmed, S., Moebus, S. & Gruehn, D. (2022): A widened array of metrics (WAM) approach to characterize the urban acoustic environment; a case comparison of urban mixed-use and forest. In: Applied Acoustics 185 (2022) 108387; doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2021.108387 .

Sueur, J. (2018). Sound analysis and synthesis with R (p. 637). Cham: Springer.

The full project description can be found here.