Automated Monitoring and Analysis of Marine Mammal Vocalizations in Coastal Habitats

A partnership of the Gitga'at First Nation, WWF-Canada and the North Coast Cetacean Society has installed a long baseline hydrophone array in Squally Channel; a culturally, ecologically, and economically important marine environment in northern British Columbia (BC), Canada. The array consists of four synchronized bottom-mounted hydrophones that permanently record and radio-transmit data to a land-based laboratory in real-time. The array covers an area of approximately 200 km2 to realize long-term and wide-range monitoring of marine mammals. To allow for efficient data analysis, automated detectors for cetacean vocalizations have been developed in collaboration with the University of Victoria. The detection performance has been tested using manually annotated data. We present an overview of the detectors for orca and humpback whales, and their computational and analytic performance as a function of signal-to-noise ratio. The ability to adapt to different ocean environments and target species is demonstrated by applying the detectors to 100 days of archival acoustic data recorded at two different places along the BC coast. Data recorded during pilot studies in 2017 from Squally Channel (approximately 30 days) is used to provide an overview of cetacean vocalization detections. Finally, we show acoustic activity variations and trends based on environmental factors.