Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 2009. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 125 (2009): 1982-1994, doi:10.1121/1.3089590.
Description:
Methods are developed for estimating the size/density of cetacean populations using data from a set of fixed passive acoustic sensors. The methods convert the number of detected acoustic cues into animal density by accounting for (i) the probability of detecting cues, (ii) the rate at which animals produce cues, and (iii) the proportion of false positive detections. Additional information is often required for estimation of these quantities, for example, from an acoustic tag applied to a sample of animals. Methods are illustrated with a case study: estimation of Blainville's beaked whale density over a 6 day period in spring 2005, using an 82 hydrophone wide-baseline array located in the Tongue of the Ocean, Bahamas. To estimate the required quantities, additional data are used from digital acoustic tags, attached to five whales over 21 deep dives, where cues recorded on some of the dives are associated with those received on the fixed hydrophones. Estimated density was 25.3 or 22.5 animals/1000 km2, depending on assumptions about false positive detections, with 95% confidence intervals 17.3–36.9 and 15.4–32.9. These methods are potentially applicable to a wide variety of marine and terrestrial species that are hard to survey using conventional visual methods.
Description:
This work was funded by two partners under
the National Oceanographic Partnership Program: the Ocean Acoustics Program of the US National Marine Fisheries Service, Office of Protected Resources, and the International
Association of Oil and Gas Producers Joint Industry Programme on Exploration and Production Sound and Marine Life.
Keywords:
Acoustic signal detection
;
Bioacoustics
;
Hydrophones
;
Oceanographic techniques
;
Underwater sound
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Article
Format:
application/pdf
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