Towards an open digital catalogue of sound signatures from the underwater soundscape

Abstract

Passive acoustic monitoring plays a crucial role to study the underwater soundscape. Identifying the sound signatures of specific marine species and anthropogenic contributions is a key step in assessing the impact of human activities on the acoustic environment. The project COSS (Catalogue of Sound Signatures) aims to build an open library of sound signatures from the coastal seascape of European waters. In this framework, a data management workflow is developed within FAIR principles from the storage of the metadata, ensuring integrity and traceability of the recorded datasets, to the analysis and the annotation method, providing interoperability classification of sound signatures. An interactive map provides an overview of the database. Sound events are analyzed using a home-made annotation software. Labeling is based on a tree-structure ontology with respect to the biological species, human activities and geophony. This labels standardization makes it possible to extract information at several levels of precision. In particular, this library will serve as a learning and testing base for open source AI algorithms for the automatic classification of signals of anthropogenic origin. A long-term objective is to provide a means of determining the acoustic impact of human activities on the marine environment.