Environmental Mismatch Research Articles

Applying double-difference methods for fine-scale acoustic tracking using a short aperture vertical array

Ray tracing can estimate an acoustic source’s depth and range in a waveguide by exploiting multipath arrival information on a vertical array. However, environmental mismatch in the model or array tilt can yield highly scattered trajectories when ray tracing multiple events. “Double-difference” methods have been used to localize earthquakes (Waldhauser and Ellsworth, 2000) and fin whales (Wilcock, 2012) by determining the relative locations of multiple events, rather than their absolute positions. This approach, which exploits changes in relative travel times between events, has recently been reformulated to recover the dive trajectory of a source using a single multi-hydrophone vertical array, whenever three acoustic rays are available for each event. Here, the method is expanded such that changes in ray elevation angles between events can be used to reduce the number of rays required. This technique is tested on data recorded on a short aperture vertical array off the coast of Southern California in 4 km deep water. Trajectories from both a controlled towed source and sperm whale dives are examined. [Work supported by Office of Naval Research—Marine Mammals and Biology and Ocean Acoustics Program.]

Ocean acidification influences host DNA methylation and phenotypic plasticity in environmentally susceptible corals.

As climate change challenges organismal fitness by creating a phenotype–environment mismatch, phenotypic plasticity generated by epigenetic mechanisms (e.g., DNA methylation) can provide a temporal buffer for genetic adaptation. Epigenetic mechanisms may be crucial for sessile benthic marine organisms, such as reef‐building corals, where ocean acidification (OA) and warming reflect in strong negative responses. We tested the potential for scleractinian corals to exhibit phenotypic plasticity associated with a change in DNA methylation in response to OA. Clonal coral fragments of the environmentally sensitive Pocillopora damicornis and more environmentally robust Montipora capitata were exposed to fluctuating ambient pH (7.9–7.65) and low pH (7.6–7.35) conditions in common garden tanks for ~6 weeks. M. capitata responded weakly, or acclimated more quickly, to OA, with no difference in calcification, minimal separation of metabolomic profiles, and no change in DNA methylation between treatments. Conversely, P. damicornis exhibited diminished calcification at low pH, stronger separation in metabolomic profiles, and responsiveness of DNA methylation to treatment. Our data suggest corals differ in their temporal dynamics and sensitivity for environmentally triggered real‐time epigenetic reprogramming. The generation of potentially heritable plasticity via environmental induction of DNA methylation provides an avenue for assisted evolution applications in corals under rapid climate change.

Feature mapping using far-field microphones for distant speech recognition

Acoustic modeling based on deep architectures has recently gained remarkable success, with substantial improvement of speech recognition accuracy in several automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks. For distant speech recognition, the multi-channel deep neural network based approaches rely on the powerful modeling capability of deep neural network (DNN) to learn suitable representation of distant speech directly from its multi-channel source. In this model-based combination of multiple microphones, features from each channel are concatenated and used together as an input to DNN. This allows integrating the multi-channel audio for acoustic modeling without any pre-processing steps. Despite powerful modeling capabilities of DNN, an environmental mismatch due to noise and reverberation may result in severe performance degradation when features are simply fed to a DNN without a feature enhancement step. In this paper, we introduce the nonlinear bottleneck feature mapping approach using DNN, to transform the noisy and reverberant features to its clean version. The bottleneck features derived from the DNN are used as a teacher signal because they contain relevant information to phoneme classification, and the mapping is performed with the objective of suppressing noise and reverberation. The individual and combined impacts of beamforming and speaker adaptation techniques along with the feature mapping are examined for distant large vocabulary speech recognition, using a single and multiple far-field microphones. As an alternative to beamforming, experiments with concatenating multiple channel features are conducted. The experimental results on the AMI meeting corpus show that the feature mapping, used in combination with beamforming and speaker adaptation yields a distant speech recognition performance below 50% word error rate (WER), using DNN for acoustic modeling.

A Comparison of Imputation Techniques using Network Traffic Data

Abstract This paper presents a novel feature extraction approach for speaker identification when the speech is corrupted by additive noise. The environmental mismatch between training and testing data degrades the performance of speaker identification system. The performance degradation is primarily due to presence of background noise when try to match a given speaker to the set of known speakers in a database. Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) are perhaps the most widely used front ends in the state of the art speaker identification systems. One of the major issues with MFCCs is that they are very sensitive to additive noise. To overcome this bottleneck, a temporal filtering procedure on the autocorrelation sequence is proposed to minimize the effect of additive noise. The proposed feature is called Relative Autocorrelation Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (A-MFCC) which is derived based on filtering the temporal trajectories of short time one sided autocorrelation sequence. This filtering process minimizes the effect of additive noise. No prior knowledge of noise characteristics is required. The additive noise can be a colored noise. For speaker identification, Hindi database was constructed from the speech samples of each known speaker. Feature vectors (MFCCs and A-MFCCs) were extracted from the samples by short-term spectral analysis, and processed further by vector quantization for locating the clusters in the feature space. Experimental results indicated that A-MFCCs significantly improved the performance of speaker identification system in noisy environment.

Host-environment mismatches associated with subalpine fir decline in Colorado

Subalpine fir decline (SFD) has killed more trees in Colorado’s high elevation forests than any other insect or disease problem. The widespread nature of this disorder suggests that the cause involves climatic factors. We examined the influence of varying combinations of average annual temperature and precipitation on the incidence and distribution of SFD. Climatic transition matrices generated in this study indicate that most healthy trees are found in climatic zones with moderate to low temperatures and high precipitation; whereas, SFD occurs mostly in zones of moderate temperatures and moderate precipitation. The contrasting distributions define an environmental mismatch. Forests matched with favorable climatic conditions thrive; those that are mismatched can become vulnerable to decline disease.

Applying double-difference methods for fine-scale acoustic tracking of controlled sources and sperm whales using a small aperture vertical array

Ray propagation modeling can estimate a source’s depth and range in a waveguide by exploiting multipath arrival information on a vertical array. However, environmental mismatch of the model, array tilt, and limited angular resolution of an array can yield highly scattered dive trajectories when ray tracing individual events. “Double-difference” methods have been used to localize earthquakes (Waldhauser and Ellsworth, 2000) and fin whales (Wilcock, 2012) by determining the location of multiple events relative to each other, rather than their absolute position. These same concepts can be reformulated into a “triple-difference” approach to track successive acoustic events on a single multi-hydrophone array. This method examines relative changes in the multipath arrival times and elevation angles over the course of a dive in order to establish a more robust track in terms of relative positions along the trajectory. Presented here are results of applying this new technique on both a towed source and sperm whales, using acoustic data recorded on a short aperture vertical array off the coast of Southern California in 4 km deep water. [Work supported by Office of Naval Research—Marine Mammals and Biology and Ocean Acoustics Program.]

Improving Statistical Robustness of Matched-Field Source Localization via General-Rank Covariance Matrix Matching

Performance of matched-field source localization is highly dependent on the precision of the model to actual physical processes. Model mismatch, including sound propagation environmental mismatch, statistical mismatch, and system mismatch, causes severe performance degradation. Statistical mismatch occurs when an insufficient snapshot set is used to estimate the data covariance matrix. Diagonal loading can improve the widely used minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) and minimum power distortionless response (MPDR) processors against statistical mismatch, however, the result relies on selection of the loading level. Previously, a new processor named the matched-covariance estimator (MCE) was shown to have statistically robust estimation capability under white noise conditions by matching the general-rank data covariance matrix with a covariance matrix of the modeled replicas. In this paper, the method is further developed in more realistic application scenarios with discrete point interferences and/or surface-generated noises. Simulations and analyses show that MCE can outperform classical MVDR/MPDR matched-field processors by: 1) exploiting both signal and noise data structure at the same time; 2) being less prone to mistaken nulling of the signal; 3) requiring no rank-1 signal space restriction; and 4) not needing signal-free and long duration training data.

Bayesian source localization with uncertain Green's function in an uncertain shallow water ocean.

Matched-field acoustic source localization is a challenging task when environmental properties of the oceanic waveguide are not precisely known. Errors in the assumed environment (mismatch) can cause severe degradations in localization performance. This paper develops a Bayesian approach to improve robustness to environmental mismatch by considering the waveguide Green's function to be an uncertain random vector whose probability density accounts for environmental uncertainty. The posterior probability density is integrated over the Green's function probability density to obtain a joint marginal probability distribution for source range and depth, accounting for environmental uncertainty and quantifying localization uncertainty. Because brute-force integration in high dimensions can be costly, an efficient method is developed in which the multi-dimensional Green's function integration is approximated by one-dimensional integration over a suitably defined correlation measure. An approach to approximate the Green's function covariance matrix, which represents the environmental mismatch, is developed based on modal analysis. Examples are presented to illustrate the method and Monte-Carlo simulations are carried out to evaluate its performance relative to other methods. The proposed method gives efficient, reliable source localization and uncertainties with improved robustness toward environmental mismatch.

Transgenerational effects persist down the maternal line in marine sticklebacks: gene expression matches physiology in a warming ocean.

Transgenerational effects can buffer populations against environmental change, yet little is known about underlying mechanisms, their persistence or the influence of environmental cue timing. We investigated mitochondrial respiratory capacity (MRC) and gene expression of marine sticklebacks that experienced acute or developmental acclimation to simulated ocean warming (21°C) across three generations. Previous work showed that acute acclimation of grandmothers to 21°C led to lower (optimized) offspring MRCs. Here, developmental acclimation of mothers to 21°C led to higher, but more efficient offspring MRCs. Offspring with a 21°C × 17°C grandmother‐mother environment mismatch showed metabolic compensation: their MRCs were as low as offspring with a 17°C thermal history across generations. Transcriptional analyses showed primarily maternal but also grandmaternal environment effects: genes involved in metabolism and mitochondrial protein biosynthesis were differentially expressed when mothers developed at 21°C, whereas 21°C grandmothers influenced genes involved in hemostasis and apoptosis. Genes involved in mitochondrial respiration all showed higher expression when mothers developed at 21° and lower expression in the 21°C × 17°C group, matching the phenotypic pattern for MRCs. Our study links transcriptomics to physiology under climate change, and demonstrates that mechanisms underlying transgenerational effects persist across multiple generations with specific outcomes depending on acclimation type and environmental mismatch between generations.

Furosemide Pharmacokinetics in Adult Rats become Abnormal with an Adverse Intrauterine Environment and Modulated by a Post-Weaning High-Fat Diet.

Adult individuals born with intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) have physiological maladaptations that significantly increase risk of chronic disease. We suggested that such abnormalities in organ function would alter pharmacokinetics throughout life, exacerbated by environmental mismatch. Pregnant and lactating rats were fed either a purified control diet (18% protein) or low-protein diet (9% protein) to produce IUGR offspring. Offspring were weaned onto either laboratory chow (11% fat) or high-fat diet (45% fat). Adult offspring (5 months old) were dosed with furosemide (10 mg/kg i.p.) and serum and urine collected. The overall exposure profile in IUGR males was significantly reduced due to a ~35% increase in both clearance and volume of distribution. Females appeared resistant to the IUGR phenotype. The effects of the high-fat diet trended in the opposite direction to that of IUGR, with increased drug exposure due to decreases in both clearance (31% males, 46% females) and volume of distribution (24% males, 44% females), with a 10% longer half-life in both genders. The alterations in furosemide pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics were explained by changes in the expression of renal organic anion transporters 1 and 3, and sodium-potassium-chloride cotransporter-2. In summary, this study suggests that IUGR and diet interact to produce subpopulations with similar body-weights but dissimilar pharmacokinetic profiles; this underlines the limitation of one-size-fits-all dosing which does not account for physiological differences in body composition resulting from IUGR and diet.

High frequency source localization in a shallow ocean sound channel using frequency difference matched field processing.

Matched field processing (MFP) is an established technique for source localization in known multipath acoustic environments. Unfortunately, in many situations, particularly those involving high frequency signals, imperfect knowledge of the actual propagation environment prevents accurate propagation modeling and source localization via MFP fails. For beamforming applications, this actual-to-model mismatch problem was mitigated through a frequency downshift, made possible by a nonlinear array-signal-processing technique called frequency difference beamforming [Abadi, Song, and Dowling (2012). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 132, 3018-3029]. Here, this technique is extended to conventional (Bartlett) MFP using simulations and measurements from the 2011 Kauai Acoustic Communications MURI experiment (KAM11) to produce ambiguity surfaces at frequencies well below the signal bandwidth where the detrimental effects of mismatch are reduced. Both the simulation and experimental results suggest that frequency difference MFP can be more robust against environmental mismatch than conventional MFP. In particular, signals of frequency 11.2 kHz-32.8 kHz were broadcast 3 km through a 106-m-deep shallow ocean sound channel to a sparse 16-element vertical receiving array. Frequency difference MFP unambiguously localized the source in several experimental data sets with average peak-to-side-lobe ratio of 0.9 dB, average absolute-value range error of 170 m, and average absolute-value depth error of 10 m.

Ecological release leads to novel ontogenetic diet shift in kokanee (Oncorhynchus nerka)

We investigate adaptive resource polymorphism in kokanee (Oncorhynchus nerka) from Jo-Jo Lake, Alaska, by determining whether previously observed niche expansion occurs at the population or individual level. Utilizing morphological, genetic, and stable isotope techniques, we found no evidence of discrete trophic morphotypes as previously described, but instead found evidence for an ontogenetic diet shift. Carbon and nitrogen isotope data indicate a 40% decrease in the proportion of benthic feeding and an increase of one trophic position over the size and age ranges of adult kokanee, corresponding to a diet shift from consumption of macroinvertebrates in smaller individuals to piscivory in larger individuals. This novel piscivory in kokanee may result from predatory and competitive freedom resulting from the lack of limnetic predators in Jo-Jo Lake. Piscivorous feeding despite a phenotype–environment mismatch has resulted in large, piscivorous kokanee having up to 70% of their gill rakers damaged. Observed reductions in gill raker number relative to the putative ancestral population are convergent with expectations for piscivorous fishes, despite a presumed lack of standing genetic variation for piscivory in the sockeye salmon – kokanee species complex. Jo-Jo Lake kokanee are a distinctive example of adaptation in salmonids in response to ecological release. This unusual population highlights the importance of phenotypic plasticity in response to competition in shaping the adaptive landscape and altering evolutionary trajectories.

Efficient localization and spectral estimation of an unknown number of ocean acoustic sources using a graphics processing unit.

This paper develops a matched-field approach to localization and spectral estimation of an unknown number of ocean acoustic sources employing massively parallel implementation on a graphics processing unit (GPU) for real-time efficiency. A Bayesian formulation is developed in which the locations and complex spectra of multiple sources and noise variances are considered unknown random variables, and the Bayesian information criterion is minimized to estimate these parameters, as well as the number of sources present. Optimization is carried out using simulated annealing and includes steps that attempt to add/delete sources to/from the model. Closed-form maximum-likelihood (ML) solutions for source spectra and noise variances in terms of the source locations allow these parameters to be sampled implicitly, substantially reducing the dimensionality of the inversion. Source sampling, addition, and deletion are based on joint conditional probability distributions for source range and depth, which incorporate the ML spectral estimates. Computing these conditionals requires solving a very large number of systems of equations, which is carried out in parallel on a GPU, improving efficiency by 2 orders of magnitude. Simulated examples illustrate localizations and spectral estimation for a large number of sources (up to eight), and investigate mitigation of environmental mismatch via efficient multiple-frequency inversion.

Matched-field source localization with multiple small-aperture arrays

This paper considers combining information from multiple small-aperture arrays in matched-field processing (MFP) for source localization. Assuming individual arrays are comprised of calibrated sensors which are synchronized in time, conventional MFP can be applied for each array and the resulting Bartlett processors summed over arrays. However, if the relative calibration and/or time synchronization is known between some or all arrays, more informative multiple-array processors can be derived by maximum-likelihood methods. For example, if the relative calibration between arrays is known, the observed amplitude variations between arrays provide additional information for source localization; if synchronization is known, phase variations provide localization information. Various multiple-array processors are derived and evaluated in terms of the probability of correct localization from Monte-Carlo analyses for a range of signal-to-noise ratios and number of frequencies for simulated shallow-water scenarios with vertical and horizontal arrays. Effects of environmental mismatch in seabed geoacoustic parameters and water depth are also considered. The analysis indicates that, dependent on array configurations, substantial improvements in source localization performance can be achieved when including relative amplitude and/or phase information in the multiple-array processor. The improvement is reduced by environmental mismatch; this degradation can be partially mitigated by including additional frequencies in the processing.

Source depth discrimination: An evaluation and comparison of several classifiers

Source depth estimation with a vertical linear array generally involves mode filtering, followed by matched-mode processing. However, this method has two main limitations: the problem of mode filtering is ill-posed in the case of partially spanning arrays; matched-mode processing is sensitive to environmental mismatch. Therefore, concerns for robustness motivate a simpler approach. The problem of depth estimation is reduced to a binary classification problem: source depth discrimination. Its aim is to evaluate whether the source is near the surface or submerged. These two hypotheses are formulated in terms of normal modes, using the concept of trapped and free modes. Several classification rules, based on modal filtering or on subspace projections, are studied. Monte-Carlo methods are used to evaluate their performance and compute receiver operating characteristics. This allows the choice of a discrimination threshold according to some expected performance. The benefits of considering a source depth discrimination problem rather than a source localization one are highlighted. The influence of noise and environmental mismatch are investigated, as well as the choice of the discrimination depth and the choice of the limit between trapped and free modes.

Stochastic-basis matched-field processing

Matched-field processing (MFP) suffers serious degradation due to environmental mismatch between received acoustic-field vectors and modeled replica vectors. Physical reasons for degradation include uncertainty caused by incomplete descriptions of the parameters and fields necessary for correct specification of the acoustic waveguide (i.e., environmental uncertainty), and system uncertainty associated with incomplete knowledge of the array configuration, source depth, etc. Recent research in the theory of stochastic-basis expansions (polynomial chaos) provides a mathematically consistent way of incorporating both types of uncertainty into MFP. Such expansions are used efficiently to construct replica matrices that steer high-rank subspaces capable of capturing signals with uncertain wavefronts. When combined with cross-spectral density matrices, stochastic-basis steering matrices enable the design of new processors with properties not previously evaluated in a MFP context. A maximum likelihood processor is developed which incorporates environmental uncertainty through polynomial chaos expansions. The processor can be written as a Frobenius product between an estimated cross-spectral density matrix and the inverse of a stochastic-basis replica matrix. This talk will outline the theoretical foundation of stochastic-basis MFP, and illustrate the method with some simulations. [Work supported by the Office of Naval Research.]

Interpretations of the frequency difference autoproduct in multipath environments

When locating remote acoustic sources in a shallow ocean sound channel, the established array signal processing technique known as matched field processing (MFP) has shown much success. However, MFP is sensitive to mismatch between the modeled and actual environments, and may fail to localize acoustic sources in the presence of such mismatch, particularly at high frequencies. A recent nonlinear array signal processing technique, frequency difference MFP (Abadi et. al. 2012, Worthmann, et. al., under review), has shown some success in localizing high frequency sources by moving the replica calculations to a lower, out-of-band, difference frequency where the detrimental effects of environmental mismatch are less severe. To extract the requisite out-of-band difference frequency information from the measured signals, a quadratic product, termed the autoproduct, is formed from complex signal amplitudes separated by the difference frequency but still lying within the signal bandwidth. Through the use of simple multipath propagation environments, the nature of this autoproduct is explored, and the reasons that it provides out-of-band field information are presented. More complex propagation environments are simulated as well to demonstrate some of the expected and unexpected behaviors of the autoproduct. [Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.]

“Shape Carries Story”: Navigating the World as Fat

“Shape Carries Story”: Navigating the World as Fat

High frequency source localization in a shallow ocean sound channel using frequency-difference matched field processing

Matched field processing (MFP) is an established technique for locating remote acoustic sources in known environments. Unfortunately, environment-to-propagation model mismatch prevents successful application of MFP in many circumstances, especially those involving high frequency signals. For beamforming applications, this problem was found to be mitigated through the use of a nonlinear array-signal-processing technique called frequency difference beamforming (Abadi et. al. 2012). Building on that work, this nonlinear technique was extended to Bartlett MFP, where ambiguity surfaces were calculated at frequencies two orders of magnitude lower than the propagated signal, where the detrimental effects of environmental mismatch are much reduced. Previous work determined that this technique has the ability to localize high-frequency broadband sources in a shallow ocean environment with a sparse vertical array, using both simulated and experimental propagation data. Using simulations, the performance of this technique with horizontal arrays and adaptive signal processing techniques was investigated. Results for signals with frequencies from 10 kHz to 30 kHz that propagated in a 100-m-deep shallow ocean sound channel with a downward refracting sound speed profile will be shown for source array ranges of one to several kilometers. [Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.]

Relative invasion risk for plankton across marine and freshwater systems: examining efficacy of proposed international ballast water discharge standards.

Understanding the implications of different management strategies is necessary to identify best conservation trajectories for ecosystems exposed to anthropogenic stressors. For example, science-based risk assessments at large scales are needed to understand efficacy of different vector management approaches aimed at preventing biological invasions associated with commercial shipping. We conducted a landscape-scale analysis to examine the relative invasion risk of ballast water discharges among different shipping pathways (e.g., Transoceanic, Coastal or Domestic), ecosystems (e.g., freshwater, brackish and marine), and timescales (annual and per discharge event) under current and future management regimes. The arrival and survival potential of nonindigenous species (NIS) was estimated based on directional shipping networks and their associated propagule pressure, environmental similarity between donor-recipient ecosystems (based on salinity and temperature), and effects of current and future management strategies (i.e., ballast water exchange and treatment to meet proposed international biological discharge standards). Our findings show that current requirements for ballast water exchange effectively reduce invasion risk to freshwater ecosystems but are less protective of marine ecosystems because of greater environmental mismatch between source (oceanic) and recipient (freshwater) ecoregions. Future requirements for ballast water treatment are expected to reduce risk of zooplankton NIS introductions across ecosystem types but are expected to be less effective in reducing risk of phytoplankton NIS. This large-scale risk assessment across heterogeneous ecosystems represents a major step towards understanding the likelihood of invasion in relation to shipping networks, the relative efficacy of different invasion management regimes and seizing opportunities to reduce the ecological and economic implications of biological invasions.