NOAA efforts to advance community standards for marine soundscape interpretation and applications

Interest and data for underwater soundscape monitoring is rapidly expanding, necessitating scalable and efficient data handling, processing, and dissemination tools. The NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) passive acoustic monitoring strategic initiative (PAM SI) is one of these efforts, and includes national-level planning for analysis and integration of soundscape metrics. Under the PAM SI, we are building on multi-year progress toward community analysis standards to scale national-level comparable data products from multiple recording technologies and projects. This effort includes refining archival methods, software tools, and baseline soundscape metrics to integrate with species detection and environmental variables. In collaboration with other NOAA line offices, agencies, and academic partners our work will continue to advance PAM data analysis and integration approaches beyond the PAM SI. A coordinated NOAA soundscapes program will leverage this progress and products to provide information about the status and condition of protected species and environments. The NOAA/National Park Service Noise Reference Station network has been sampling throughout U.S. waters for over a decade, providing exemplar datasets for each step in this big data challenge. Current applications for these data include quantifying multi-year regional trends in relation to species presence, anthropogenic factors, and climate patterns.