New algorithms for open ocean marine mammal monitoring

The Naval Undersea Warfare Center has been funded by the Office of Naval Research Environmental Requirements Advanced Technology (ERAT) program to create a multi-disciplinary program to conduct Marine Mammal Monitoring on Navy Undersea Ranges (M³R). The objective is to supplement extensive undersea range and signal processing hardware with state of the art passive marine mammal detection, localization and tracking algorithms. This system will provide the opportunity to determine the number of acoustically active species within an instrumented, open ocean area and to evaluate baseline behavior. The initial system will be demonstrated at the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center (AUTEC), Andros Island, Bahamas. Many of the existing assets at AUTEC will be leveraged, including the data collected by the ongoing marine mammal monitoring program. Undersea range coverage at AUTEC includes a steep island slope feature that may serve as a feeding habitat for several cetaceans including the sperm whale (Physter macrocephalus), short-finned pilot whale (Globicephala macrorhynchus), minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata), and several species of dolphins. The development of a database of marine mammal recordings at AUTEC is currently underway using five-minute recordings taken once every half hour. The M³R program is increasing the rate of acoustic data collection at AUTEC and evaluating the ability to passively track the location of various species based on features of the transient acoustic marine mammal calls. Acoustic characteristics of species recorded at the AUTEC as well as developmental marine mammal monitoring algorithms are presented