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Aquatic environments encompass the world’s most extensive habitats, rich with sounds produced by a diversity of animals. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is an increasingly accessible remote sensing technology that uses hydrophones to listen to the underwater world and represents an unprecedented, non-invasive method to monitor underwater environments. This information can assist in the delineation of biologically important areas via detection of sound-producing species or characterization of ecosystem type and condition, inferred from the acoustic properties of the local soundscape. At a time when worldwide biodiversity is in significant decline and underwater soundscapes are being altered as a result of anthropogenic impacts, there is a need to document, quantify, and understand biotic sound sources–potentially before they disappear. A significant step toward these goals is the development of a web-based, open-access platform that provides: (1) a reference library of known and unknown biological sound sources (by integrating and expanding existing libraries around the world); (2) a data repository portal for annotated and unannotated audio recordings of single sources and of soundscapes; (3) a training platform for artificial intelligence algorithms for signal detection and classification; and (4) a citizen science-based application for public users. Although individually, these resources are often met on regional and taxa-specific scales, many are not sustained and, collectively, an enduring global database with an integrated platform has not been realized. We discuss the benefits such a program can provide, previous calls for global data-sharing and reference libraries, and the challenges that need to be overcome to bring together bio- and ecoacousticians, bioinformaticians, propagation experts, web engineers, and signal processing specialists (e.g., artificial intelligence) with the necessary support and funding to build a sustainable and scalable platform that could address the needs of all contributors and stakeholders into the future.
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Compilation of existing underwater PAM repositories, libraries, and applications for sound processing
Resources for passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) are continuously expanding and being developed, yet a major challenge for users is staying up-to-date and finding the best software or application for their acoustics investigation. We expand on previous efforts (Rhinehart & Nicholson, 2022; Felgate, 2023) with the aim of providing a current, comprehensive list of 1) underwater sound repositories of raw sound data without significant processing, 2) biological sound reference libraries, with species or taxa identification, and 3) sound processing tools for visualization, annotation, or analysis. This spreadsheet contains three pages, one dedicated to each of the aforementioned items, along with some descriptive information to help users identify the best resources for their needs. This work was done to support the Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds (GLUBS) project and funded in part by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and from funding to SCOR WG #169 (GLUBS) provided by national committees of the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) and from a grant to SCOR from the US National Science Foundation (OCE--2140395), with support from the International Quiet Ocean Experiment.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2140395
- PAR ID:
- 10653244
- Publisher / Repository:
- Zenodo
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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