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Human activities are rapidly changing ecosystems around the world. These changes have widespread implications for the preservation of biodiversity, agricultural productivity, prevalence of zoonotic diseases, and sociopolitical conflict. To understand and improve the predictive capacity for these and other biological phenomena, some scientists are now relying on observatory networks, which are often composed of systems of sensors, teams of field researchers, and databases of abiotic and biotic measurements across multiple temporal and spatial scales. One well-known example is NEON, the US-based National Ecological Observatory Network. Although NEON and similar networks have informed studies of population, community, and ecosystem ecology for years, they have been minimally used by organismal biologists. NEON provides organismal biologists, in particular those interested in NEON's focal taxa, with an unprecedented opportunity to study phenomena such as range expansions, disease epidemics, invasive species colonization, macrophysiology, and other biological processes that fundamentally involve organismal variation. Here, we use NEON as an exemplar of the promise of observatory networks for understanding the causes and consequences of morphological, behavioral, molecular, and physiological variation among individual organisms.

Animals glean information about risk from their habitat. The acoustic environment is one such source of information, and is an important, yet understudied ecological axis. Although anthropogenic noise has become recently ubiquitous, risk mitigation behaviors have likely been shaped by natural noise over millennia. Listening animals have been shown to increase vigilance and decrease foraging in both natural and anthropogenic noise. However, direct comparisons could be informative to conservation and understanding evolutionary drivers of behavior in noise. Here, we used 27 song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) and 148 laboratory behavioral trials to assess foraging and vigilance behavior in both anthropogenic and natural noise sources. Using five acoustic environments (playbacks of roadway traffic, a whitewater river, a whitewater river shifted upwards in frequency, a river with the amplitude modulation of roadway traffic, and an ambient control), we attempt to parse out the acoustic characteristics that make a foraging habitat risky. We found that sparrows increased vigilance or decreased foraging in 4 of 6 behaviors when foraging in higher sound levels regardless of the noise source or variation in frequency and amplitude modulation. These responses may help explain previously reported declines in abundance of song sparrows exposed to playback of intense river noise. Our results imply that natural soundscapes have likely shaped behavior long before anthropogenic noise, and that high sound levels negatively affect the foraging-vigilance trade-off in most intense acoustic environments. Given the ever-increasing footprint of noise pollution, these results imply potential negative consequences for bird populations.