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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.