Underwater noise generated by human activities such as shipping raises concerns about its potential impact on marine life, for instance, by affecting their ability to navigate, communicate, feed, and reproduce. With increased shipping activity along traditional routes and the opening of new shipping lanes, changes in noise distribution in Canadian waters are expected. The Canadian Species at Risk Act imposes to protect the habitats of endangered species from degradation. It is therefore imperative to better understand and quantify the impacts of shipping noise on marine life, so that adequate and efficient protective measures can be implemented where necessary.
To aid these efforts, MERIDIAN and collaborators are developing a web-based, interactive Ocean Soundscape Atlas that will enable users to visualize and explore modeled noise levels in a multitude of dimensions including latitude, longitude, depth, time, frequency, and source type, and obtain impact risk estimates in areas of interest.
The Ocean Soundscape Atlas uses validated physical models to determine the levels of noise in Canadian waters due to shipping activity and geophysical environmental noise sources such as wind and waves. The Atlas will provide a novel interface between researchers, on one hand, and managers, policy makers, and the general public, on the other hand, facilitating the transfer of scientific information from researchers to the public and more generally contributing to an increased ocean literacy. The Atlas will allow managers and policy makers to monitor trends in the state of the ocean acoustic environment, and hence ensure more timely, effective, and efficient marine environmental conservation and management of the valued and especially protected marine species.
As part of this project, we are also developing a new software library to facilitate the modelling of underwater soundscapes, initially focusing on noise created by environmental agents such as waves and rain. The library is written in Python and will be made freely available to the community under the GNU General Public License v3.
