History of the Acoustical Society of America’s standard on “Underwater Passive Acoustic Monitoring for Bioacoustic Applications”: Metadata issues.

Abstract

In 2005 an ASA working group was formed to examine whether a standard should exist for “Passive Acoustic Monitoring for Marine Mammal Mitigation for Seismic Surveys”. Public discussions at subsequent meetings quickly showed no consensus existed for specifying hardware requirements for passive acoustic measurements, but consensus did seem possible for specifying “minimum requirements for recording and reporting bioacoustic data.” The proposed standard was renamed “Underwater Passive Acoustic Monitoring for Bioacoustic Applications” with three defined goals: (1) providing a set of requirements for information to be documented while recording acoustic data at sea (metadata requirements); (2) detailing the minimum information about acoustic hardware and software to be included when reporting results in gray or peer‐reviewed literature; and (3) specifying metrics to be used when summarizing the features of an acoustic signal. After languishing for several years, an attempt is being made to develop the standard further. This presentation describes what ASA standards are, outlines the development process, and sketches the current status of the standard, with an emphasis on metadata issues.