The next wave of passive acoustic data management: How centralized access can enhance science

Abstract

Passive acoustic data collection has grown exponentially over the past decade resulting in petabytes of data that document our ocean soundscapes. This effort has resulted in two big data challenges: the curation, management, and global dissemination of passive acoustic datasets and efficiently extracting critical information and comparing it to other datasets in the context of ecosystem-based research and management. To address the former, the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information established a passive acoustic data archive, which contains over 100 TB of audio files mainly collected from stationary recorders throughout waters in the U.S. These datasets are documented with standards-based metadata and are freely available to the public. To begin to address the latter, through standardized processing and centralized stewardship and access, we will present a previously unattainable comparison of first order sound level-patterns from archived data collected across three distinctly separate long-term passive acoustic monitoring efforts conducted at regional and national scales: NOAA/National Park Service Ocean Noise Reference Station Network, the NOPP-funded Atlantic Deepwater Ecosystem Observatory Network, and the NOAA-Navy Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring Project. Further, we will propose the next frontier for scalable data stewardship, access, and processing flow to help the community collaboratively move forward.