Marine Mammal Monitoring

Understanding the marine mammals that are present in a marine environment, including their habitat use and behaviours, is a fundamental step when studying or moving towards preserving it. When clients need to monitor the presence and behaviour of marine mammals, underwater acoustics can deliver reliable, high-quality results at a much lower cost than other survey methods. 

Whether it be weeks, months, or years, our marine mammal monitoring service can be tailored to the needs of any project and budget. 

Our scientists are experts in all aspects of marine mammal monitoring using acoustics, and will select the right combination of survey tools to provide clients a comprehensive understanding of what marine mammal species are present and insights into their habitat use.

Our marine mammal monitoring tools include:

• Active surveys: from vessel-deployed cabled hydrophones on GPS-tracked buoys to towed arrays with localisation capabilities.
• Passive acoustic monitoring: Acoustic recorders that continuously eavesdrop for marine mammal vocalisations. Data is processed after the recorder has been retrieved. Deployment in any water depths with our acoustic releases.
• Real-time detection: Moored systems consisting of hydrophone arrays connected to data acquisition modules (such as those from National Instruments) and central processing units. 

Our scientists aim to provide clients real insight into marine mammal activity through our proprietary acoustic analysis software, FinFinder. FinFinder uses a range of signal processing techniques, species classifications using machine learning algorithms, and accelerated performance using GPU arrays and parallel computing capabilities.