Passive acoustic monitoring has become an important tool in fisheries and ecological studies and we know very little about fish sounds, particularly in the Pacific Ocean. There are less than 1000 species of fish that have been documented to produce sound, compared to the 30,000 fish species that exist in Read more…
MERIDIAN is working with JASCO to design a tool for visualizing underwater acoustic data with a directional component that indicates bearing for use by biologists and other researchers. This system will visualize data collected from hydrophone arrays that are capable of discerning the bearing of sound sources, which can help Read more…
Underwater acoustic data is important for understanding the oceans and how sound affects the marine environment. To record underwater sounds produced by, for instance, marine mammals, waves, and ships, and to capture the complexity and interactions of the marine soundscape, hydrophones and other acoustic recording devices are used. These devices Read more…
Many marine species have evolved to rely primarily on sound for underwater navigation, prey detection, and communication. Marine biologists and other ocean researchers listen to the sounds generated by marine animals, for example, to detect the presence of an endangered species or to study social behavior. In recent years, increasing Read more…
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 Read more…
Ketos is a software package for acoustic data analysis with neural networks. It was developed with a particular eye to detection and classification tasks in underwater acoustics. The first version of Ketos was released in April 2019. Ketos was developed by the MERIDIAN Data Analytics Team at the Institute for Read more…
The recently established Canadian Integrated Ocean Observing System/Système Intégré d’Observation des Océans du Canada (CIOOS/SIOOC) is a national effort to facilitate the knowledge exchange in ocean sciences and to make oceanographic data from various public, private and academic stakeholders discoverable and accessible to the end-user. It is an initiative that Read more…
In Miami, US, a research team led by Dr. Neil Hammerschlag from the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, is studying how coastal urbanization is affecting the distribution, movement, and health of coastal sharks. The study, known as the Urban Sharks project, is focusing on the Read more…
Acoustic tracking is widely used by marine biologists to study the distributions and movements of fishes and marine mammals on time scales ranging from hours to months or even years. Highly powerful, the technique allows scientists to map the migration routes of salmon, or correlate the habitat use and movement Read more…
Despite the increasing amounts of underwater acoustic data that become available every day, only a small proportion is actually labelled. MERIDIAN is developing a crowdsourcing platform for labeling datasets, which can then be used to train machine learning models. The platform will allow users to create labeling sessions for their Read more…
