SEDNA - Bioacoustic analysis toolbox

The possible effects of anthropogenic noise on the marine environment is becoming an important topic in the oceanic community. The exploration for fossil-fuel or alternative energy and the construction of facilities to support these endeavors often requires sizable construction efforts; which usually require permitting to study the impact of noise on the environment. Of particular interest is the variety of data products used to influence environmental impact reports and the processing time required to generate these data from large amounts of passive acoustic recordings. This paper outlines work being done by the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University and the Lab of Ornithology, (BRP) for developing MATLAB tools in support of environmental compliance reporting. Due to the success of acoustic monitoring, understanding acoustic signatures is now becoming part of environmental impact assessment and required compliance for permitting. BRP has leveraged various existing tools and capabilities which result in integrated special purpose software tools within a MATLAB toolbox called SEDNA. SEDNA incorporates various tools to measure acute and chronic noise levels, detect and classify marine mammal vocalizations, and compute various metrics such as receive levels, signal excess, masking and communication space. This work will summarize the high performance computing strategy used in the SEDNA Toolbox along with the capability to integrate various layers of data within a modeling framework that incorporates ambient noise, vessel and animal data. Finally, the work will demonstrate the power of this approach through animated data visualization, showing animal, vessel and ambient noise integrated over relatively large temporal and spatial scales.