Publication Date:
2019-07-17
Description:
Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has emerged as a highly efficient technology to conduct long-term monitoring of marine mammals at species dependent, local to basin
scales, providing valuable new insights into species distributions and migration patterns. To study Antarctic mammals, we deployed up to ten moored, autonomous
acoustic recorders in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean. Due to this region’s remoteness, challenging accessibility, and ensuing logistic constraints, especially
during winter, recording devices were/are deployed for two years or longer, resulting in high demands on their power efficiency and storage capability.
Two types of recorders, AURAL and MARU, which were deployed in March 2008 and December 2008, respectively, were recovered in December 2010. More recently, a set of
eight, newly developed recorders (SONOVAULT), were deployed in December 2010, and are scheduled for recovery in December 2012. While in-situ recordings are hence
available for AURAL and MARU, for SONOVAULTs extensive laboratory tests have been performed. Based on these recordings, this paper provides a user-based comparison
of these three types of acoustic recorders, discussing their technical specifications and limitations (including recent enhancements) along with their actual performance
and data quality. The paper concludes with a discussion of future needs for long-term monitoring applications along with each instrument’s potential to meet such
requirements.
Repository Name:
EPIC Alfred Wegener Institut
Type:
Conference
,
notRev
Format:
application/pdf
