Quantifying ship noise bias in fish abundance estimates in the Great Lakes

Abstract

Prey fish abundances in the Great Lakes are a driver for several agencies commitments to the Council of Lake Committees to support fisheries management. These management decisions have profound economic and social impacts within the Great Lakes region. Fisheries estimates done by echosounders or trawling may be biased due to the propagated noise from large fisheries vessels. In the first year of a four year collaborative study, crewed fisheries vessels and uncrewed Saildrone vessels were used to compare abundance estimates between “loud” and “quiet” vessels. In order to quantify the effects of ship noise on prey fish abundance estimates, a mobile ship noise measurement system was designed and deployed to measure radiated acoustic signatures of several ships in the Great Lakes. This talk will discuss the deployment of a mobile underwater acoustic test range, and show initial results of ship noise measurements from the first year of the program. In addition, an overview of the echosounder abundance results will be given along with plans for future data generation, analysis, and comparison between crewed and autonomous systems.