JONAS - Joint Framework for Ocean Noise in the Atlantic Seas

D4.3 - Data sharing platform

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Ref.: JONAS Deliverable 4.3, July 2021

Abstract:
During the last decade, underwater noise was considered as an important form of ocean pollution. This topic got under the political spotlight, leading to a greater awareness of the scientific community and therefore to an increase of acoustic monitoring efforts worldwide.
This fact highlighted the importance of cooperation between countries and institutions, particularly in what concerns data exchange. However, exchanging data may be extremely sensitive, and requires various considerations to ensure the complete description of the data being shared, its privacy, and the possibility to compare results between institutions and countries. The JONAS project developed an effort to describe underwater acoustic guidelines and standards for monitoring anthropogenic ocean noise, which will allow evaluating its impact on marine species and ultimately on ocean biodiversity. Hence, this report describes the development of a data sharing platform combining a set of standard procedures and open source tools to facilitate data sharing between institutions. The first step encompasses the definition standard algorithms to transform raw acoustic data into averaged sound pressure level data and their respective statistics, which was implemented based on the already existent PAMGuide tool. The second step covered the definition of the metadata covering the relevant information about the data being shared, having in mind its posterior usage. The third step was to define a high level file structure to store sound maps, both from real and modeled data, in an open source shareable single standardized file.
In order to promote the wider usage and exchange of acoustic data among the underwater community, JONAS proposes also two packages based on Matlab and Python language, both composed of an interactive menu-based application and low-level standalone routines, that may be called from existing user specific code.