Autonmous Real-time Marine Mammal Detections

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution


Race Point Mooring Engineering Trial 2014


Platforms

Buoy DMON1 (deployed August 21, 2014)


Study objectives

A moored buoy with a DMON/LFDCS was deployed 2.5 miles northwest of Race Point near Provincetown, Massachusetts, on August 21, 2014 to monitor the occurence of humpback, fin, sei, and right whales in real time over several months. This is the second deployment of the moored DMON/LFDCS buoy system, and our objective is to test the buoy's capabilities and performance. Detection data on this website should be viewed with caution, as the noise characteristics of the moored buoy are not well known.

Principal Investigators: Mark Baumgartner (WHOI) and Sofie Van Parijs (NOAA NEFSC).

Collaborators: John Kemp of the WHOI Mooring Operations, Engineering and Field Support Group


Questions

Please email Mark Baumgartner at mbaumgartner@whoi.edu. For a general desciption of the detection system and the autonomous platforms, visit dcs.whoi.edu.


Study chronology

Aug 21

The moored buoy (DMON1) was deployed today at 10:00 am by Kris Newhall off Race Point, Massachusetts.

Sep 4

Fin whale 20-Hz calls have been heard every day of the past 2 weeks. Some outstanding examples of patterned 20-Hz calls were detected on Sep 1 and Sep 2.

Acknowledgements

Engineering support for the moored buoy application of the DMON/LFDCS was provided by WHOI engineers Jon Ware, Leo-Paul Pelletier, and the WHOI ACOMMS group. The buoy was expertly prepared and deployed by Kris Newhall, Will Ostrom, and Jeff Pietro of the WHOI Mooring Operations, Engineering and Field Support Group, and at sea assistance was provided by Ken Houtler (captain) and Ian Hanley (mate) of the R/V Tioga. Support for the development of the moored buoy application of the DMON/LFDCS was provided by the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Advanced Sampling Technologies Working Group. The DMON instrument was developed by Mark Johnson and Tom Hurst at WHOI. Mark Johnson was responsible for developing the application programming interface (API) for the DMON, and coded the initial DMON implementation of the pitch tracking algorithm described in Baumgartner and Mussoline (2011). Support for the development and testing of the DMON/LFDCS was provided by the Office of Naval Research and the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Advanced Sampling Technologies Working Group. NOAA funding was provided through the Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region.


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