Mesoscale habitat use by St. Lawrence estuary beluga over the annual cycle from an acoustic recording network.

The spatial-temporal distribution pattern of St. Lawrence Estuary (SLE) beluga is examined with a passive acoustic monitoring network of 13 stations from June 2018 to October 2021. A beluga calling index, correlated with beluga density, is used as a proxy for habitat use by the population at weekly, monthly, and yearly scales.

Performance of a deep neural network at detecting North Atlantic right whale upcalls.

Passive acoustics provides a powerful tool for monitoring the endangered North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), but robust detection algorithms are needed to handle diverse and variable acoustic conditions and differences in recording techniques and equipment. This paper investigates the potential of deep neural networks (DNNs) for addressing this need. ResNet, an architecture commonly used for image recognition, was trained to recognize the time-frequency representation of the characteristic North Atlantic right whale upcall.

Decadal passive acoustics time series of St. Lawrence estuary beluga.

Passive acoustics is used to monitor the threatened St. Lawrence estuary beluga between 2007 and 2017 from a site downstream of the beluga summer habitat. Acoustic metrics of presence and occurrence based on beluga acoustic band activity (BABA) are extracted by a dedicated algorithm adapted for the shipping noise from the St.

Analysis and modeling of 255 source levels of merchant ships from an acoustic observatory along St. Lawrence Seaway.

An ensemble of 255 spectral source levels (SSLs) of merchant ships were measured with an opportunistic seaway acoustic observatory adhering to the American National Standards Institute/Acoustical Society of America S12.64-2009 standard as much as possible, and deployed in the 350-m deep lower St. Lawrence Seaway in eastern Canada.

A Seaway Acoustic Observatory in Action: The St. Lawrence Seaway.

A setup for measuring spectral source levels (SSLs) of ships transiting along a seaway, the traffic density and shipping noise, is presented. The results feed shipping-noise modeling that reproduces the actual in situ observations to map shipping-noise variability over space and time for investigating its effects on aquatic organisms. The ship's SSL databank allows sorting the different contributors to total shipping noise for assisting in exploring mitigation approaches (e.