Hello WILDLABS! As humbled and grateful recipients of a 2025 WILDLABS Award, we are excited to introduce our project to the community. Our multinational and multisector team is composed of Mpala Research Centre (@NinaW ), Lion Landscapes, Matt Shungoh (@mattShungoh), and the University of California Santa Cruz. I am a PhD student in Chris Wilmers' Lab at UCSC and started Ambiance as a solution to a shortcoming in available technology. I wanted to conduct a long-term, landscape-scale playback experiment off-grid to evaluate the impacts of human disturbance on wildlife, but had no means of powering existing speakers in the field for more than a few hours - rendering a 50-speaker, 2-km^2 experimental design completely infeasible. A similar experiment conducted in the Santa Cruz mountains utilized speakers powered by D cells, but there was no way I would be able to afford, much less internationally transport to field sites in East Africa, the thousands of batteries that would be required to power the playback speakers in this way. Instead, some engineering colleagues and I put our heads together and prototyped an automated, solar-powered playback speaker with an unlimited lifespan and robust to the heat, dust, downpours, and curious wildlife of East Africa. 

We had some humble beginnings – initially daisy chaining preexisting technologies together, with our first field season resulting in some excellent learning opportunities regarding how not to create a viable playback speaker. Our second round of prototyping resulted in a viable device that could play a variety of acoustic treatments on custom schedules indefinitely (when paired with a 40W solar panel) and proved capable of handling all of the challenges thrown at it from a technical standpoint. 

Our subsequent field season resulted in a successful pilot experiment with striking results. Wildlife at Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia, Kenya were either exposed to calm conversations of humans speaking or local bird vocalizations across two 1-km^2 grids of 25 speakers over the course of a 10-week, repeated measures experiment. Throughout the sampling period, we collected occupancy, activity, and foraging data via camera traps and while we are still sifting through the sheer volume of information collected, the preliminary findings are promising from an ecological and conservation standpoint. When exposed to human voices in comparison to control treatments, elephant activity levels (66%), space use (50%), foraging frequency (80%), and tree damage (67%) were reduced drastically. These impacts were not only restricted to upper trophic levels, with black-backed jackals reducing 59% and impala increasing 40% when exposed to human voices. Mesocarnivore (27%) and nocturnal rodent (25%) foraging intensity also decreased significantly when exposed to human voices. These profound changes in community structure and function from systematic playbacks of human voices prompted us to apply for the 2025 WILDLABS Awards. 

With support from Arm and Flora & Fauna International, we will be 1) establishing a manufacturing process in Kenya to build Ambiance units locally, 2) deploying units in rural communities around Laikipia to evaluate their ability to artificially elevate perceived risk of human encounters and directly reduce crop raiding by elephants and livestock depredation by large carnivores, and 3) open-sourcing our designs so they can be produced at-cost by interested researchers and conservation practitioners. At the moment, we are in our final weeks of stress testing our third-generation Ambiance prototype, where we have been focusing on usability and fidelity by implementing Bluetooth connectivity, graphical user interfaces, playback scheduling flexibility, and additional operational redundancies. For those of you keeping score at home, this means there will be no need to climb through hundreds of Acacia trees to deploy Ambiance units! Soon after we will begin assembly and initiate field deployments. We are a collaborative bunch and interested in maximizing the conservation and research potential of Ambiance so please do reach out to myself or other members of the team, if any of the above interests you and you would like to hear more. Stay tuned for project updates over the course of the next year as we continue to progress through our goals and benchmarks!