Bruce Martin

JASCO Research Ltd | JASCO · Halifax

The soundscape of a given habitat is a product of its physical environment, human activity, and presence of soniferous marine life, which can be used to understand ecosystem processes, habitat quality, and biodiversity. Shallow coral habitats are hotspots of biodiversity and marine life. Deep-sea coral environments, in comparison, are generally poo...

An ocean-ice-acoustic coupled model is configured for the Beaufort Sea. The model uses outputs from a data assimilating global scale ice-ocean-atmosphere forecast to drive a bimodal roughness algorithm for generating a realistic ice canopy. The resulting range-dependent ice cover obeys observed roughness, keel number density, depth, and slope, and...

Mobile offshore drilling units (MODUs) are used to drill oil and gas wells in the ocean. For deeper water operations, there are two common forms of MODUs: semisubmersible rigs and drillships. Over the past several years, JASCO Applied Sciences measured MODU drilling operations by semisubmersibles and drillships, including platforms that were moored...

Performing reproducible vessel source level (SL) measurements is complicated by seabed reflections in shallow water. In deep water, with a hydrophone far from the seabed, it is straightforward to estimate propagation loss (PL) and convert sound pressure level (SPL) into SL using the method codified in the international standard ISO 17208-2 [Interna...

Using a 2-year time series (2019–2020) of 1-min sound pressure level averages from seven sites, the extension of COVID-related quieting documented in coastal soundscapes to deep (approximately 200–900 m) waters off the southeastern United States was assessed. Sites ranged in distance to the continental shelf break and shipping lanes. Sound level de...

Long‐term distribution data for cetaceans are lacking, inhibiting the ability of management bodies to assess trends and react appropriately. Such is true even along the US Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) where previous passive acoustic monitoring programs have laid the groundwork for monitoring cetacean occurrence over a multidecadal scale....

Six baleen whale species occur off eastern Canada, but little is known of their year-round occurrence across this large region. This complicates identifying areas that are important to them and may require critical habitat designation, especially for those species considered at risk. This is particularly true between fall and spring because of a la...

Experimental research has shown that beaked whales exhibit strong avoidance reactions to naval active sonars used during antisubmarine warfare training exercises, including cessation of echolocation and foraging activity. Behavioural responses to sonar have also been linked to strandings and mortality. Much of the research on the responses of beake...

The habitat of the endangered southern resident killer whale (SRKW) overlaps major international shipping lanes near the Port of Vancouver, British Columbia. Shipping is a dominant source of underwater noise, which can hinder SRKW key life functions. To reduce environmental pressure on the SRKWs, Vancouver Fraser Port Authority offers incentives fo...

Estimates of abundance and their changes through time are key elements of marine mammal conservation and management. Absolute marine mammal abundance in a region of the open ocean is often difficult to attain. However, methods of estimating their abundance based on passive acoustic recordings are becoming increasingly employed. This study shows tha...

In this research, a new application using broadband ship noise as a source-of-opportunity to estimate the scattering field from the underwater targets is reported. For this purpose, a field trial was conducted in collaboration with JASCO Applied Sciences at Duncan’s Cove, Canada in September 2020. A hydrophone array was deployed in the outbound shi...

Best Practice Guide for Underwater Particle Motion Measurement for Biological Applications

No PDF available ABSTRACT The Atlantic Deepwater Ecosystem Observatory Network (ADEON) provided an opportunistic dataset to examine potential COVID-19 effects in a deep, offshore region of the US southeastern Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) to determine if the quieting documented in coastal soundscapes extended to deep, offshore waters. A two-year ti...

No PDF available ABSTRACT The Atlantic deep-water Ecosystem Observation Network project (https://adeon.unh.edu/) deployed seven autonomous long-term observatory landers in waters between 250 and 900 m deep along the east coast of the United States for three years (November 2017–November 2020). The objectives of the project included quantifying the...

No PDF available ABSTRACT JASCO’s novel passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) system, OceanObserver was deployed in Canada’s Gulf of Saint Lawrence (GoSL) in autumn 2018 aboard a Slocum G3 glider. The purpose of this mission was to assist in the search for endangered North Atlantic Right Whales and other threatened cetaceans, and to report detections i...

No PDF available ABSTRACT To evolve our ability to compare soundscapes across time, location and research groups, a standard suite of metrics is essential. Significant progress towards establishing standard approaches for quantifying the amplitude of the soundscape has been made in recent years, however advancing qualitative metrics has been challe...

The aquatic world of animals is an acoustic world as sound is the most prominent sensory capacity to extract information about the environment for many aquatic species. Fish can hear particle motion, and a swim bladder potentially adds the additional capacity to sense sound pressure. Combining these capacities allows them to sense direction, distan...

Making Ambient Noise Trends Accessible (MANTA) software is a tool for the community to enable comparisons between soundscapes and identification of ambient ocean sound trends required by ocean stakeholders. MANTA enhances the value of individual datasets by assisting users in creating thorough calibration metadata and internationally recommended pr...

A methodology for the analysis of soundscapes was developed in an attempt to facilitate efficient and accurate soundscape comparisons across time and space. The methodology consists of a collection of traditional soundscape metrics, statistical measures, and acoustic indices that were selected to quantify several salient properties of marine sounds...

In the original paper [JASA Express Lett. 1(1), 011203 (2021)], a method for processing, storing, and sharing high-bandwidth, passive acoustic spectral data that optimizes data volume while maintaining reasonable data resolution was proposed. The format was a hybrid that uses 1-Hz resolution up to 455 Hz and millidecade frequency bands above 455 Hz...

Escuchar paisajes sonoros submarinos nos ayuda a entender cómo la física oceánica y la biología de las comunidades marinas están respondiendo a un océano que cambia dinámicamente.

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) can inform wildlife management by providing information on the distribution of cetaceans. This paper presents an automatic data selection for validation (ADSV) method to effectively identify all species acoustically present in large PAM data sets. The ADSV method involves the application of automated detectors, the...

No PDF available ABSTRACT A novel methodology for the analysis of soundscapes was developed in an attempt to facilitate quick and accurate soundscape comparisons across time and space. The methodology, proposed here for the first time, consists of a collection of traditional soundscape metrics, statistical measures, and acoustic indices that were s...

Geophysical exploration of the seabed is typically done through seismic surveys, using airgun arrays that produce intense, low-frequency-sound pulses¹ that can be heard over hundreds of square kilometers, 24/7.²,³ Little is known about the effects of these sounds on free-ranging fish behavior.4, 5, 6 Effects reported range from subtle individual ch...

This Letter proposes a frequency scaling for processing, storing, and sharing high-bandwidth, passive acoustic spectral data that optimizes data volume while maintaining reasonable data resolution. The format is a hybrid that uses 1 Hz resolution up to 455 Hz and millidecade frequency bands above 455 Hz. This hybrid is appropriate for many types of...

The problem of estimating bearings of impulsive wideband acoustic signals produced by vocalizing animals and received by a compact array of synchronized sensors is addressed. The accuracy provided by the maximum-likelihood (ML), the beamformer (BF), and the time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) based estimators is evaluated by simulations and in situ t...

The Royal Canadian Airforce (RCAF) is proud of its well-deserved reputation for environmental stewardship. With the advent of in-service low-frequency active sonar sources the RCAF is reviewing and updating policies and procedures to limit the potential impacts of active sonar on whales. During active sonar activities, passive sonar sonobuoys can b...

Commercial Snow Crab (Chionoecetes opilio) harvesters believe marine noise from seismic surveys reduces commercial Snow Crab catch rates. Depending on the type of seismic survey used, animals living in a particular area could be exposed to loud noise (e.g. daily Sound Exposure Level (SEL) >165 dB re 1 μPa²·s) for periods ranging from hours (typical...

In 2017, an endangered North Atlantic right whale mortality event in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada, triggered the implementation of dynamic mitigation measures that required real-time information on whale distribution. Underwater glider-based acoustic monitoring offers a possible solution for collecting near real-time information but has many pr...

The problem of estimating spatial distribution and density of vocalizing marine animals is addressed. The proposed solution is based on using a fixed compact array of synchronized hydrophones and statistically optimal detection and estimation algorithms. The closed-form representations of the practical algorithms are presented. The performance of t...

The aim of underwater noise exposure criteria in a regulatory context is to identify at what received levels noise-induced effects are predicted to occur, so that those effects may be appropriately considered in an evaluation or mitigation context under the respective regulatory regime. Special emphasis has been given to hearing related impairment...

Masking is often assessed by quantifying changes, due to increasing noise, to an animal's communication or listening range. While the methods used to measure communication or listening ranges are functionally similar if used for vocalizations, they differ in their approaches: communication range is focused on the sender's call, while the listening...

Six baleen whale species are found in the temperate western North Atlantic Ocean, with limited information existing on the distribution and movement patterns for most. There is mounting evidence of distributional shifts in many species, including marine mammals, likely because of climate‐driven changes in ocean temperature and circulation. Previous...

Research into automated systems for detecting and classifying marine mammals in acoustic recordings is expanding internationally due to the necessity to analyze large collections of data for conservation purposes. In this work, we present a Convolutional Neural Network that is capable of classifying the vocalizations of three species of whales, non...

Regulations designed to mitigate the effects of man-made sounds on marine mammal hearing specify maximum daily sound exposure levels. The limits are lower for impulsive than non-impulsive sounds. The regulations do not indicate how to quantify impulsiveness; instead sounds are grouped by properties at the source. To address this gap, three metrics...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Automatic detection of marine animal vocalizations is increasingly used to analyse the extensive acoustic datasets collected from autonomous passive acoustic recorders, resulting in a constant effort to improve detector accuracy and develop new and more efficient detection methods. Differentiating between the clicks produc...

No PDF available ABSTRACT JASCO Applied Sciences has developed a novel passive acoustic monitoring system, the OceanObserverTM, that has been fielded in undersea and surface AUVs as well as on buoys and sub-sea observatories. The hardware is based on the Zynq system-on-a-chip (SoC), which features a large field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and tw...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Recent work [1,2] has shown that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained on spectrograms of acoustic signals are capable of learning high-level latent representations for the purpose of detecting and classifying the vocalizations of endangered baleen whales. The aforementioned latent representations were used in the d...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Research into automated systems for detecting marine mammal vocalizations within acoustic recordings is expanding internationally due to the necessity to analyze large collections of data collected for passive acoustic monitoring. Recent work towards the development of such systems using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Long-term passive acoustic monitoring programs have been conducted over several years using directional acoustic recorders. The data from these recorders provide an indication of the direction to each detected signal, which includes calls from blue, fin, sei, and minke whales. The directional results provide new informatio...

Research into automated systems for detecting and classifying marine mammals in acoustic recordings is expanding internationally due to the necessity to analyze large collections of data for conservation purposes. In this work, we present a Convolutional Neural Network that is capable of classifying the vocalizations of three species of whales, non...

The AN/SSQ-53 Directional Frequency Analysis and Recording (DIFAR) sonobuoy is an expendable device that can derive acoustic particle velocity along two orthogonal horizontal axes, along with acoustic pressure. This information enables computation of azimuths of low-frequency acoustic sources from a single compact sensor. The standard approach for...

Acoustic recordings were made during the installation of four offshore wind turbines at the Block Island Wind Farm, Rhode Island, USA. The turbine foundations have four legs inclined inward in a pyramidal configuration. Four bottom mounted acoustic recorders measured received sound levels at distances of 541–9067 m during 24 pile driving events. Li...

The auditory frequency weighted daily sound exposure level (SEL) is used in many jurisdictions to assess possible injury to the hearing of marine life. Therefore, using daily SEL to describe soundscapes would provide baseline information about the environment using the same tools used to measure injury. Here, the daily SEL from 12 recordings with d...

This paper estimates seabed geoacoustic profiles at 14 sites offshore of the eastern Canadian coast using sound levels from a single airgun. A 210 in³ airgun was operated along two track lines at each site and a calibrated seabed-mounted Autonomous Multichannel Acoustic Recorder equipped with a single omnidirectional hydrophone recorded the airgun...

Knowledge of ambient noise is important for the design and operation of acoustic observation and communication systems. Several concurrent year-long acoustic datasets from the Canada Basin Acoustic Propagation Experiment (CANAPE) were collected in 2016–2017. Selected data were analyzed to investigate soundscape temporal and spatial characteristics...

Little is known of the spatio-temporal occurrence of beaked whales off western Ireland, limiting the ability of Regulators to implement appropriate management and conservation measures. To address this knowledge gap, static acoustic monitoring was carried out using eight fixed bottom-mounted autonomous acoustic recorders: four from May to December...

Period 2, station1 automated detections for Sowerby’s beaked whales. (CSV)

Period 3, station7 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 3, station8 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 4, station7 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 3, station7 automated detections for Sowerby’s beaked whales. (CSV)

Period1, station1 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 2, station2 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 1, station2 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 1, station2 automated detections for Sowerby’s beaked whales. (CSV)

Period 1, station4 automated detections for Sowerby’s beaked whales. (CSV)

Period 2, station3 automated detections for Sowerby’s beaked whales. (CSV)

Period 2, station4 automated detections for Sowerby’s beaked whales. (CSV)

Period 3, station5 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 4, station5 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 1, station1 automated detections for Sowerby’s beaked whales. (CSV)

Period 2, station3 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 3, station6 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 3, station3 automated detections for Sowerby’s beaked whales. (CSV)

Period 4, station8 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 4, station5 automated detections for Sowerby’s beaked whales. (CSV)

Period 4, station7 automated detections for Sowerby’s beaked whales. (CSV)

Period 3, station8 automated detections for Sowerby’s beaked whales. (CSV)

Period 2, station4 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 1, station4 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)

Period 2, station1 automated detections for Cuvier’s beaked and northern bottlenose whales. (CSV)