mathewbiddle / biosound-exploratory-project

Documentation for the exploratory project for acoustic-based biodiversity indices for multiple ocean environments

Biosound Exploratory Project

The BioSound working group is composed of various scientists and stakeholders interested in producing acoustic-based data products that support marine biodiversity monitoring and conservation (https://marinebon.org/biosound/). This initial project consists of an exploratory analysis involving multiple datasets from different ocean environments. The intent of this analysis is to identify trends in several soundscape ecology metrics across different ocean environments. The specific analytical plan includes:

• Identify a set of acoustic-based biodiversity indices to calculate and compare across a subset of data (approximately 2 months of data for each environment, though we are requesting three). We anticipate including several indices (8-10) that Pieretti & Danovaro (2020) discusses in relation to importance for marine environments. For reference, this study by Alcocer et al. (2022) provides a useful summary of utility and application of these biodiversity indices. We will determine ideal parameters for datasets with varied sampling rate and file duration, and perform iterative testing to identify best settings.
• Leverage existing annotations of biological sounds in the given datasets.
• Determine the occurrence of vessel traffic in the data in order to assess common trends on the impact of this noise on all indices. We also plan to use this information to extract measurements from periods without vessel traffic.
• Relate acoustic indices to available, remotely sensed environmental data from each region to evaluate any relationships. We will specifically focus on satellite derived ocean color data products.

Project Documentation

The methods and tool used in this project are documented in the website associated with this repository. Please visit https://ocean-science-analytics.github.io/biosound-exploratory-project/overview.html for additional project details. The documentation also shares the shinyapp used to relay information on data products for this project.

Derived Datasets

Analytical data products are also available within this repository. Visit the "Acoustic_Indices" folder and "seascapeR" folder for access to those data.