This Proposal was submitted to the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) Broad Agency Announcement 10-024 titled "Marine Mammal Detection and Monitoring" and selected for funding by NSF.
The PI's request funding to create a three-tiered hierarchical framework to process and disseminate passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) data. The PI's will expand the capabilities of OBIS-SEAMAP to allow better metadata management, easier access to available data, and improved visualization and processing tools. Currently the availability of raw and processed acoustic data is not easily accessible from a centralized location. The expansion of OBIS-SEAMAP proposed by the PI's would provide the tools for researchers and managers to obtain data, and process it to obtain usable results (e.g. maps of animal locations relative to oceanographic features, animations of animal locations over time).
Broader Impacts:
The developments from this study would benefit users of OBIS-USA, iOBIS and GBIF networks. A technical workshop will be organized by the PI's to discuss developing improvements in OBIS SEAMAP functions with input from passive acoustic experts. The resulting improvements to OBIS SEAMAP will become publicly available and the improvements in data visualizations can be used for both research and educational purposes.
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) data is increasingly used to monitor the presence of marine mammals in coastal ocean environments. Passive acoustic data is collected by listening devices (hydrophones) that can identify if a calling animal is within the region, or if an array of multiple hydrophones is deployed, to triangulate the location of a calling animal. PAM data is now used in protected species monitoring, habitat modeling and marine spatial planning. With increased development in coastal regions for fisheries, shipping, oil and gas exploration, the need for increased monitoring of the presence of critical marine mammal species is becoming more important. This project focused on enhancing common standards and accessibility of PAM data. We did this through the development of novel tools for advanced spatio-temporal analyses and visualizations and the improvement of the interoperability of PAM data among institutions and data centers that host PAM data. Our major activities in this project were summarized as follows: Consultation with PAM researchers to improve the spatio-temporal analyses and visualizations of PAM data using the OBIS-SEAMAP information system and registration of their PAM detection records into the OBIS-SEAMAP database; Development of a semi-automated data transfer mechanism from the Tethys Metadata Server to the OBIS-SEAMAP database; Expansion of the OBIS-SEAMAP database to increase the interoperability of PAM data among institutions and data centers that host PAM data; Development of mapping and visualization tools for PAM data on the OBIS-SEAMAP web site; and Release of the improved OBIS-SEAMAP mapping and visualization tools. Through the consultation with PAM researchers, we developed advanced mapping and visualization tools on the OBIS-SEAMAP web site for better spatio-temporal analyses of PAM detection records. The highlights of the advancements include: Fixed sensor locations are mapped with indication of effort presence around the location; Spectrogram images and recorded sounds associated with the detection records can be visualized or linked to the external Internet services; Individual sensors are selectable for further investigation online; Interactive time-series graphs visualize click counts and detections per species with effort hours; Diel plots are available to depict the tendency of animal’s daily behavior; 3D mapping capability using Google Earth is introduced to effectively visualize the dive profile of animals tagged with DTags. Moreover, we made significant efforts to integrate PAM data with other data types such as traditional visual line-transect sightings and locations of tagged animals in a consistent, scientifically sound way of querying and visualizing various data types together. As a result, the OBIS-SEAMAP web site allows users to: set spatio-temporal criteria to extract and map PAM detection records along with other data types; distinguish PAM data from other types of data with different symbology on the map; and assess temporal graphs (e.g. the number of records over years or in seasons) with different data types stacked; assess more complete time series graphs with no gaps scattered around in the time series which lowers the possibility of a misrepresentation of species occurrence over time; search datasets based on any words using a full-text search against the metadata elements in the database. We successfully transferred 125 datasets containing more than 16,000 PAM detection records from the Tethys Server hosted at the San Diego State University. Our efforts in this project have greatly increased attention in the field to share PAM data with researchers around the world and have helped make OBIS-SEAMAP one of the most productive venues for aggregating, disseminating and archiving PAM data. Since we adopted the Tethys metadata schema, OBIS-SEAMAP provides greater interoperability for the exchange of PAM data among research programs. This project developed: (1) initial data schemas for the exchange and storage of PAM data; (2) initial metadata standards for the documentation of PAM data; (3) visualization methods for the viewing of different types of PAM data. In total, 138 datasets with 202,500 detection records have been registered in the OBIS-SEAMAP database for 22 marine mammal species. Our development efforts and findings in the project have led to four peer-reviewed publications; three are published and one is in preparation for submission. Fujioka, E., Halpin, P.N., 2014. Spatio-temporal Assessments of Biodiversity in the Open Ocean: an Introduction to Novel Online Tools in OBIS-SEAMAP, a global biogeographic database. Endangered Species Research, Vol. 24: 181-190. Fujioka, E, Soldevilla, M.S., Read, A.J., and Halpin, P.N., 2014. Integration of Passive Acoustic Monitoring Data into OBIS-SEAMAP, a Global Biogeographic Database, to Advance Spatially-explicit Ecological Assessments. Ecological Informatics, Vol. 21: 59-73. Fujioka, E., Kot, C.Y., Wallace, B.P., Best, B.D., Moxley, J., Cleary, J., Donnelly, B., Halpin, P.N., 2014. Data Integration for Conservation: Leveraging Multiple Data Types to Advance Ecological Assessments and Habitat Modeling for Marine Megavertebrates using OBIS-SEAMAP. Ecological Informatics, Vol. 20: 13-26. Roch, M.A., Baumann-Pickering, S., Batchelor, H., Berchok, C.L., Fujioka, E, et al. In preparation. Acoustic metadata management for bioacoustics.
