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 integrate existing technologies, namely the Bioacoustics Research Program (BRP) marine autonomous recording unit ("Pop-Up") hardware, and detection, classification, and localization (DCL) software into a wave-powered glider towing a small array. An autonomous marine mammal monitoring system will be developed that includes a broadband satellite communications system that would be capable of transmitting detection, classification, and localization data in near real-time to an on-ship or onshore Data Management and Communications (DMAC) receiver.
Broader Impacts:
Successful development of the proposed system has the potential to provide a lower cost method for monitoring marine mammals in areas that would otherwise not be surveyed. Monitoring and understanding the impacts of anthropogenic noise on marine mammals is becoming more important as human induced sound in the marine environment increases. The system could potentially lower the cost of monitoring because it will not require a local ship for its deployment or retrieval and it reduces the steps needed for data analyses by broadcasting data over the Satcom link and providing initial DCL measures prior to human data processing. The potential for transferring data via the broadband satellite link will be a huge boon for the community as currently limited bandwidth inhibits progress in DCL.
