Increasing access to big bioacoustic data through cloud-based systems

Abstract

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) has recently developed an archive for the long-term stewardship of passive acoustic data. Protocols for archiving passive acoustic data are currently being established in support of the NOAA Ocean Noise Reference Station Network project, and monitoring marine mammals and fish. Archives maintain data, but access to these data is a core mission of NCEI that allows users to discover, query, and analyze the data in new and innovative ways. To facilitate global access to what will be 100s of TB of bioacoustic data, NCEI has partnered with Google Cloud through the NOAA Big Data Project. Cloud-based access to large volumes of data creates the ability to listen to sound files, download more easily, and bring processing routines to the data instead of bringing the data to the processing.