Use of Ecoacoustics to Characterize the Marine Acoustic Environment off the North Atlantic French Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon Archipelago

Abstract

Visual observations of the marine biodiversity can be difficult in specific areas for different reasons, including weather conditions or a lack of observers. In such conditions, passive acoustics represents a potential alternative approach. The objective of this work is to demonstrate how information about marine biodiversity can be obtained via detailed analysis of the underwater acoustic environment. This paper presents the first analysis of the Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon (SPM) archipelago underwater acoustic environment. In order to have a better knowledge about the marine biodiversity of SPM, acoustic recordings were sampled at different time periods to highlight seasonal variations over several years. To extract information from these acoustic recordings, standard soundscape and ecoacoustic analysis workflow was used to compute acoustic metrics such as power spectral density, third-octave levels, acoustic complexity index, and sound pressure levels. The SPM marine acoustic environment can be divided into three main sound source classes: biophony, anthrophony, and geophony. Several cetacean species were encountered in the audio recordings including sperm whales (which were detected by visual observations and strandings of 3 males in 2014), humpback, and blue whales.

Acoustic features as a tool to visualize and explore marine soundscapes: Applications illustrated using marine mammal passive acoustic monitoring datasets

“…Marine mammals produce complex vocalizations that are species‐specific (if not individually unique), and such vocalizations can be used when estimating species' distributions and habitat use (Durette‐Morin et al., 2019 ; Kowarski & Moors‐Murphy, 2021 ). PAM applications in marine mammal research span from the study of their vocalizations and behaviors (Madhusudhana et al., 2019 ; Vester et al., 2017 ) to assessing anthropogenic disturbance (Nguyen Hong Duc et al., 2021 ). PAM datasets can reach considerable sizes, particularly when recorded at high sampling rates, and projects often rely on experts to manually inspect the acoustic recordings for the identification of sounds of interest (Nguyen Hong Duc et al., 2021 ).…”

“…PAM applications in marine mammal research span from the study of their vocalizations and behaviors (Madhusudhana et al., 2019 ; Vester et al., 2017 ) to assessing anthropogenic disturbance (Nguyen Hong Duc et al., 2021 ). PAM datasets can reach considerable sizes, particularly when recorded at high sampling rates, and projects often rely on experts to manually inspect the acoustic recordings for the identification of sounds of interest (Nguyen Hong Duc et al., 2021 ). For projects involving recordings collected over multiple months at different locations, conducting a manual analysis of the entire dataset can be prohibitive, and often only a relatively small portion of the acoustic recordings is subsampled for analysis.…”

“…Marine mammals produce complex vocalizations that are species-specific (if not individually unique), and such vocalizations can be used when estimating species' distributions and habitat use (Durette-Morin et al, 2019;Kowarski & Moors-Murphy, 2021). PAM applications in marine mammal research span from the study of their vocalizations and behaviors (Madhusudhana et al, 2019;Vester et al, 2017) to assessing anthropogenic disturbance (Nguyen Hong Duc et al, 2021).…”

Make the CPUs do the hard work - Automated acoustic feature extraction and visualization for marine ecoacoustics applications illustrated using marine mammal Passive Acoustic Monitoring datasets

“…Marine mammals produce complex vocalizations that are species-specific (if not individually unique), and such vocalizations can be used when estimating species' distributions and habitat use (Durette-Morin et al, 2019;Kowarski & Moors-Murphy, 2020). PAM applications in marine mammal research span from the study of their vocalizations and behaviours (Madhusudhana et al, 2019;Vester et al, 2017) to assessing anthropogenic disturbance (Nguyen Hong Duc et al, 2021). PAM datasets can reach considerable sizes, particularly when recorded at high sampling rates, and projects often rely on experts to manually inspect the acoustic recordings for the identification of sounds of interest (Nguyen Hong Duc et al, 2021).…”

“…PAM applications in marine mammal research span from the study of their vocalizations and behaviours (Madhusudhana et al, 2019;Vester et al, 2017) to assessing anthropogenic disturbance (Nguyen Hong Duc et al, 2021). PAM datasets can reach considerable sizes, particularly when recorded at high sampling rates, and projects often rely on experts to manually inspect the acoustic recordings for the identification of sounds of interest (Nguyen Hong Duc et al, 2021). For projects involving recordings collected over multiple months at different locations, conducting a manual analysis of the entire dataset can be prohibitive, and often only a relatively small portion of the acoustic recordings is subsampled for analysis.…”