This award to monmouth university for $625,000.00

This $625,000 Project Grant award from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under the Congressionally Identified Awards and Projects program (CFDA 11.469) supports Monmouth University's efforts to enhance marine mammal monitoring along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. The award will enable the university to utilize its Digital Acoustic Monitoring (DMON) instrument and Low-Frequency Detection and Classification System (LFDCS) technology to remotely detect and report the calls of endangered North Atlantic right whales in real-time from autonomous platforms like ocean gliders and moored buoys. This technology provides a cost-effective complement to traditional monitoring approaches like shipboard and aerial surveys. The project aims to significantly improve NOAA's research and monitoring capabilities, allowing the agency to identify areas of persistent whale occurrence and direct additional visual surveillance as needed. Additionally, the award supports efforts to advance the DMON/LFDCS technology, including expanding flash memory and testing a new particle motion sensor.

Passive acoustic monitoring is a vital part of nmfs mission to assess and manage marine mammal stocks, since IT provides a persistent and cost effective complement to more traditional monitoring approaches (i.e., shipboard and aerial surveys). Recent advances in automated detection and classification techniques for low-frequency baleen whale calls have made determining occurrence in real-time from in-situ acoustic instrumentation feasible. We have developed the capability to remotely detect and report a wide variety of calls produced by several species of baleen whales from autonomous platforms, including slocum ocean gliders and moored buoys. The enabling technology for this project is the digital acoustic monitoring (dmon) instrument and the low- frequency detection and classification system (lfdcs), a combined hardware (dmon) and software (lfdcs) system capable of detecting and reporting low-frequency narrowband sounds in real time. The dmon instrument collects, conditions, processes, and records audio from up to three attached hydrophones, and since IT is programmable, applications can be developed to detect, classify, and report sounds from the collected audio in real time. The lfdcs is software that detects and describes sounds using pitch tracking, and classifies those sounds using quadratic discriminant function analysis. The combined dmon/lfdcs has been integrated with several autonomous platforms. With inflation reduction act (IRA) funds, we propose to use the dmon/lfdcs on slocum gliders and moored buoys to improve monitoring of the highly endangered north atlantic right whale along the U.S. Eastern seaboard. We propose additional project tasks to advance the dmon/lfdcs technology as well, including expanding flash memory and testing a new particle motion sensor interfaced with the dmon/lfdcs. We anticipate that NOAA will be able to significantly enhance its research and monitoring efforts using real-time detection information to identify areas of persistent whale occurrence, and to direct airplane- or ship-based surveys to regions that require additional visual surveillance.