Methods for the Deployment and Maintenance of an Acoustic Tag Tracking Array: An Example from California's Channel Islands

The evolution of acoustic tracking has led to more marine installations, used to identify movement patterns, preferred habitats, ranges, and behaviors of the tracked species. This overview of the techniques used to deploy, recover, and maintain acoustic tracking equipment focuses on an array of 94 hydrophones in a net around the Channel Islands in southern California. The array is used to track 200 individuals of several species. Methods are described for plotting the hydrophone locations, deploying the hydrophones, recovering the hydrophones and their data, and maintaining the arrays.