ROME – Without traffic and traffic jams, motorists run more, producing more noise that impacts the wildlife that lives in the reserves around large cities, such as, for example, Boston. Boston University ecologist Richard Primack and Carina Terry, a college student working in Primack’s research lab, ventured into Boston area parks, iPhones in hand, to record ambient sounds to see how sound levels they had changed from pre-pandemic times, when there were more people around, construction works and cars on the street. Primack, a biology professor at BU College of Arts & Sciences, has been studying noise pollution for over four years and has trained over a hundred students and city conservationists to collect noise samples at nature sanctuaries across Massachusetts.
The team focused their study on three locations in the state: Hammond Pond Reservation in Newton, Hall’s Pond Sanctuary in Brookline, and Blue Hills Reservation – by far the largest of the three – covering parts of Milton, Quincy, Braintree, Canton. Randolph and Dedham. They collected noise samples from all three parks using a specialized sound detection app on the iPhone called SPLnFFT.
Then, referring to the huge library of sound data collected earlier by the Primack lab, the study authors compared the sound levels collected over the months during the pandemic with measurements collected before the pandemic began. The resulting paper was recently published in the journal Biological Conservation.
The researchers found that Hammond Pond Reservation and Hall’s Pond Sanctuary, both located in suburban residential areas, had lower noise levels. But at the Blue Hills Reservation, they discovered the opposite: sound levels increased dramatically in all areas of the park “which – says Terry – was very surprising.” Blue Hills is a popular destination for local excursions and is intersected by numerous highways and major roads. Although there are fewer cars on the roads today, the researchers say their sound recordings indicate that the cars are moving much faster, generating more noise. This finding is in line with a trend that has been observed nationwide: the pandemic has seen traffic jams replaced with an increase in reports of reckless drivers accelerating on open roads. “Before the pandemic, traffic was relatively slow on I-93 because it was very congested,” says Primack, the senior author of the study. Now, the noise of the fastest cars “penetrates the entire park,” he says, measuring about five decibels louder, even inside the park, than in pre-pandemic times.
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