PROJECTS

The autonomous real-time reporting passive acoustic detection buoy was developed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and has been maintained off the coast of Cape Charles since October 2023. The buoy has the ability to detect and classify whale vocalizations using a digital acoustic monitoring instrument (DMON) and sophisticated analysis software to listen for whales as well as send notifications and data to researchers in near-real time.

Sensor data from the buoy are relayed to shore and posted on the project’s publicly accessible website at Robots4Whales. The DMON is programmed with the Low-frequency Detection and Classification System (LFDCS; Baumgartner and Mussoline 2011, Baumgartner et al. 2013) and is capable of detecting NARWs and humpback, fin, and sei whales. Detection data are transmitted in near real time to shore where they are reviewed daily by trained analysts, and the results are posted on the project website, distributed to interested parties by automated email messages, made available on WhaleMap. Confirmed detections of NARWs will trigger a temporary “slow zone” for vessels. Slow Zones are a voluntary program NOAA Fisheries uses to notify vessel operators to slow down to protect NARWs—maintaining speeds of 10 knots or fewer can help protect NARWs from vessel collisions. Under these programs, NOAA Fisheries provides maps and coordinates to vessel operators indicating areas where NARWs have been detected. For a period of 15 days after a whale is detected, mariners are encouraged to avoid these areas or reduce speeds to 10 knots or fewer while transiting through these areas. Active Slow Zones can be found on NOAA’s website as well as WhaleMap.

This buoy was strategically placed to complement sound trap deployments and to facilitate the HDR Inc. field team efforts within the area.  Three arrays of SoundTraps off the coast of Delaware, southeastern Virginia, and Virginia’s Eastern Shore were deployed beginning in July 2022 (Eastern Shore began in October 2023) to monitor for the presence of NARWs within the western Mid-Atlantic in collaboration with NOAA NEFSC.  This contributes to a multi-agency effort to build out a broader regional long-term PAM network covering the continental shelf break from Maine to Georgia. These archival PAM systems are serviced and re-deployed approximately twice annually.

All SoundTraps are processed by NEFSC with the LFDCS and analyzed for daily presence for NARW upcalls, fin whale pulses, blue whale song, humpback whale song, and sei whale downsweeps following the methods described in Davis et al. (2017) and Davis et al. (2020). If a day contained the required number of detections for the call types specified, that species was logged as “detected.”