Determining temporal recording schemes for underwater acoustic monitoring studies

• Main Author: Lindseth, Adelaide Virginia
• Other Authors: Lobel, Phillip S.
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Acoustics; Ambient noise; Coral reef; Environmental monitoring; Passive acoustic monitoring; Soundscape ecology; Underwater sound
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/2144/34796

Soundscape Ecology, the physical combination of sounds at a particular time and place, is a rapidly growing field. As acoustic technology advances, several possible future uses of passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), such as biodiversity counts and monitoring of habitat health, are being explored. This thesis is divided into two chapters; each is a stand-alone paper. The first chapter provides a review of soundscape ecology, ambient sound, current recording methods and data analysis used in PAM studies, and identifies several major future recommendations for the field. One of these recommendations is to standardize recording methods and indices used during analysis in long-term studies. The second chapter analyzes a 55-minute continuous recording on a coral reef in Tunicate Cove, Belize in 1996 by Professor P. Lobel. This recording was then subsampled with several intermittent recording schedules to explore the amount of acoustic information lost as periods of active and inactive recording vary. The continuous recording consisted of a high frequency band (3-4 kHz), which may correspond to abiotic sounds, and a low frequency band (0.1-0.5 kHz), which generally corresponds to biotic sounds. Two recording schedules, 30 seconds every 4 minutes and 2 minutes every 10 minutes, were significantly correlated with the continuous recording. The statistical significance of the other five recording schedules varied among the three parameters tested in this study (average power (dB), average entropy, and aggregate entropy).