The Consortium for Ocean Leadership (COL) coordinated a full-day hybrid-format workshop on 29 April 2022 to gather input from the ocean sound and acoustics community to contribute to the Maritime Acoustic Environment (UN-MAE). The workshop was supported by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation. The summary report in English is listed below, as well as translations into Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish.

• Arabic
• English
• Hindi
• Mandarin Chinese
• Spanish

World Oceans Passive Acoustic Monitoring Day (WOPAM Day)

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has developed significantly over the last 20 years and hydrophones are now being deployed in more locations, more often, by more people, than ever before. To celebrate the increasing breadth of the application of PAM around the world, and help promote public awareness of Ocean Sound to an increasingly interested global community, a new initiative has proposed a celebration of aquatic PAM on World Oceans Day (June 8).

Through the Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds (GLUBS), a call has gone out to hydrophone operators for their interest to participate in a World Oceans Passive Acoustic Monitoring (WOPAM) Day. The premise for the first year of this initiative is simple; to share data from any already planned deployments recording on June 8th for a collaborative study of our global aquatic soundscapes, whether in salt, brackish or freshwater.

So, if you already have a hydrophone in the water, that will be recording on June 8th (or have a planned project to deploy before then), and are interested in participating in WOPAM Day, please contact Miles Parsons (m.parsons@aims.gov.au) or Steve Simpson (s.simpson@bristol.ac.uk) for further information.

IQOE Newsletter #10 is available for download here. 

The International Quiet Ocean Experiment announces the availability of the Ocean Sound EOV Implementation Plan for community input. The plan is available at Ocean-Sound-EOV-Implementation-Plan-For-Community-Review-1.pdf (scor-int.org). Please submit your comments by 15 February through one of two methods: 

1. We prefer that you submit comments through a Google form, which provides a text box for input for each chapter:  Ocean Sound EOV Implementation Plan Feedback (google.com)
2. If you do not wish to cut and paste your comments into the Google form, or do not have access to Google, please submit your comments through the SurveyMonkey system: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FTTF2VV. You can submit either a marked-up document or a document listing your suggestions in bullet format.

In either case, please note the line number and your specific suggestion.

The Consortium for Ocean Leadership has released a summary report on its Workshop toward Planning an Ocean Sound Decade. See https://scor-int.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Ocean-Sound-Workshop-Report-1.pdf.

IQOE Newsletter #9 is available at IQOE-Newsletter-9-1.pdf (scor-int.org).

New paper: A quantitative inventory of global soniferous fish diversity (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11160-022-09702-1…). See also FishSounds database at https://fishsounds.net/index.js. See also press release.

The IQOE Working Group on Acoustic Measurement of Ocean Biodiversity Hotspots and other colleagues have published an article calling for a Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds (GLUBS) (see article at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.810156/full and press release at Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds, “GLUBS,” Will Help Monitor Changing Marine Life (constantcontact.com)). The latest IQOE Newsletter is available here.  IQOE is co-sponsored by the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research and Partnership on Observation of the Global Ocean.

IQOE has been compiling metadata about hydrophone deployments for the past two years. This database includes records for about 600 current and past hydrophone deployments. A map as of 8 August 2021 is given at https://www.iqoe.org/systems. I am in the process of updating this static map.

We know that static maps on a specific date do not present a complete picture of hydrophone deployments. We are in the process of updating the hydrophone database to make it possible to create maps for a range of dates to provide more complete information. We are also adding the possibility to show mobile deployments that start and end at different geographic coordinates.

The updated database will be integrated with the IQOE Website. It will not contain acoustic data for the hydrophone deployments, but will contain metadata for each one, including contact information, that will make it easier to obtain data.

If you have not yet submitted hydrophone metadata for the existing database—for current or past deployments and stationary or mobile deployments—and would like to get your metadata into the database, please submit your metadata on the input form.

Apart from providing a community resource, IQOE hopes to use the database to identify data holders who can help create time series of ambient ocean sound for different parts of the ocean by the end of IQOE in 2025. 

Please forward this email to anyone you think would be interested in submitting metadata.

Best regards,

Ed Urban

IQOE Project Manager

The IQOE WG on Marine Bioacoustical Standardization has released the IQOE Inventory of existing standards and guidelines relevant to marine bioacoustics.  It complements the IQOE inventory of physical ocean acoustics standards.