[Submission]: Cetacean Weekly Acoustic Presence

[rebecca-vanhoeck]

Data Source(s)

Data collected by the NEFSC Passive Acoustic Branch from four recording sites in and around the southern New England Wind Energy areas.

Data Processing

Species-specific vocalizations of eight cetacean were identified in the acoustic data using multiple automated detectors following the methodology described in Van Parijs et al (2023).

Data Analysis

Manual verification of the automated detections was conducted to confirm daily acoustic presence for each species. Weekly acoustic presence was summarized as the median number of days of acoustic presence per calendar week across all data. Horizontal lines within the boxes indicate the median, box boundaries indicate the 25th (lower quartile) and 75th (upper quartile) percentiles, vertical lines indicate the largest (upper whisker) and smallest (lower whisker) values no further than 1.5 times the interquartile range, and black dots represent outliers. Further details of the analysis can be found in Van Parijs et al (2023).

Bibiography

@Article{10.1093/icesjms/fsad148,
author = {Van Parijs, S M and DeAngelis, A I and Aldrich, T and Gordon, R and Holdman, A and McCordic, J A and Mouy, X and Rowell, T J and Tennant, S and Westell, A and Davis, G E},
title = "{Establishing baselines for predicting change in ambient sound metrics, marine mammal, and vessel occurrence within a US offshore wind energy area}",
journal = {ICES Journal of Marine Science},
pages = {fsad148},
year = {2023},
month = {09},
abstract = "{Evaluating potential impacts on marine animals or increased sound levels resulting from offshore wind energy construction requires the establishment of baseline data records from which to draw inference. This study provides 2 years of baseline data on cetacean species’ presence, vessel activity, and ambient sound levels in the southern New England wind energy area. With eight species/families present in the area for at least 9 months of the year, this area represents an important habitat for cetaceans. Most species showed seasonality, with peak daily presence in winter (harbour porpoise, North Atlantic right, fin, and humpback whales), summer (sperm whales), spring (sei whales), or spring and fall/autumn (minke whales). Delphinids were continuously present and blue whales present only in January. The endangered North Atlantic right whales were present year round with high presence in October through April. Daily vessel presence showed an increase from summer through fall/autumn. On average, ambient sound levels were lowest in summer and increased late 2021 through 2022 with most temporal variability occurring across lower frequencies. The area showed a complex soundscape with several species sharing time–frequency space as well as overlap of vessel noise with the communication range of all baleen whale species.}",
issn = {1054-3139},
doi = {10.1093/icesjms/fsad148},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsad148},
eprint = {https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/advance-article-pdf/doi/10.1093/icesjms/fsad148/51818532/fsad148.pdf},
}