- Welcome everyone to the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries webinar series.
We're so pleased to have you joining us today.
We have nearly 600 direct registrants
for today's presentation about
exploring underwater sound in national marine sanctuaries.
We, myself, and Chloe McKenna,
will be your webinar co-hosts today.
I am Claire Fackler,
the National Education Liaison for the sanctuary system,
and Chloe McKenna is a junior at Eckerd College
in St Petersburg, Florida,
and is a VSFS intern through the State Department,
and she works to support our
headquarters education for the sanctuary system.
So, we're so excited that you're here with us.
Our webinar series is primarily targeting
formal and informal educators and other interested audiences,
so we welcome all of you.
I'm sure there's some K-12 teachers
and some other informal educators with us
and lots of interested adults and students,
so thank you for being with us.
A few introductory slides before we begin today's presentation.
If you're not already aware,
we, within the United States of America,
are celebrating 50 years of ocean and coastal conservation.
So in 1972, 50 years ago,
our US congress did some sweeping legislation
that we are now celebrating for 50 years.
Things like the Clean Water Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act,
the Marine Mammal Protection Act,
and also the National Marine Sanctuaries Act.
So, these are important legislative efforts
that we're celebrating 50 years,
including the fact that we have these
national parks which are like,
sorry, national parks that are underwater.
We call them national marine sanctuaries.
So, as part of our 50th anniversary campaign,
we invite all of you to save spectacular,
and to help us celebrate
these spectacular, special ocean places.
- This is a map of North America,
and each blue dot on the map represents one of our
15 national marine sanctuaries,
which are underwater treasures that are protected now
and for future generations.
The triangles represent the marine national monuments
that NOAA manages as a part of this system,
and the yellow boxes represent
special ocean and Great Lakes areas
that are being considered to become
our nation's next underwater parks.
These underwater parks were set aside for both
protection and enjoyment, now and in the future,
and decisions about how to best manage
each of these special places
continue to be made using the best available scientific data,
as well as extensive public input.
Each national marine sanctuary and marine national monument
has its own unique history and purpose.
National marine sanctuaries seek to preserve
the beauty and biodiversity of these special marine places,
while also providing a space to preserve
maritime heritage and cultural heritage
by establishing national marine sanctuaries
that protect shipwrecks and other significant artifacts.
These special ocean places
protect threatened and endangered marine life,
like this Hawaiian green sea turtle.
The National Marine Sanctuaries Act mandates
that we conduct education and outreach,
research,
and monitoring.
We do all of this to protect these resources –
the ecosystems, habitats, and living things,
to preserve them for future generations.
These underwater parks are places
that we want everyone to enjoy.
We encourage you all to recreate in these special ocean areas
through activities such as kayaking,
fishing,
snorkeling,
scuba diving,
surfing,
or even getting on a boat and viewing marine life.
Our hope is that some of you will become so inspired
through your interactions with these spectacular places
that you will eventually volunteer
to conserve these underwater treasures.
- And I also wanted to mention that Marine Protected Areas, MPAs,
like national marine sanctuaries and marine national monuments,
they can help with climate resiliency.
They're a nature-based solution.
So, they help with climate resiliency by storing carbon and protecting biodiversity.
And we, at NOAA, like to say that you can celebrate Earth Day every day.
So, we really hope that you get out and recreate
and enjoy your national marine sanctuaries,
and use your voice to help protect them as these nature-based solutions
to help address the climate crisis.
With that, I'll have Chloe introduce our speaker today.
- Yes, I'm very pleased to introduce Dr. Leila Hatch for today's webinar.
Dr. Hatch is a research ecologist
with the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries' Science and Heritage division.
Dr. Hatch coordinates our efforts to monitor
underwater sound across the sanctuary system
and apply that information to better protect these special places.
She co-led the Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring Project with the US Navy,
and co-leads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's
Ocean Noise Strategy initiative with colleagues in NOAA Fisheries.
Dr. Hatch lives with her family in Boston, Massachusetts,
and she began working with Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary,
off the coast of Massachusetts,
after a fellowship working on fisheries and ocean legislation
in the US House of Representatives.
She received a doctoral degree from Cornell University in evolutionary biology
focused on relationships among fin whale populations.
She has participated in research programs off the coast of
Australia, Madagascar, Hawaii, California, and Massachusetts
to study potential impacts from a variety of human activities
on whale and dolphin populations.
Thank you, Dr. Hatch, for joining us today.
- Thank you very much Chloe and Claire.
Can you hear me alright?
- Yes, yes we can.
- Thank you.
Thank you for attending today's webinar.
As we introduce the
Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring project's new web portal.
This portal was built to support a real range of users,
from those with a general interest in
what we hear in national marine sanctuaries,
to those who are interested in using the measurements of sound
that we provide in the portal
to better understand and protect these places.
And my plan today is to highlight parts of the portal
that can serve these diverse purposes.
I won't be able to delve deeply into any specific use today,
but we are leaving time for questions
and can follow up on what interests you.
So to begin, I'd like to prepare for listening.
I'll be playing a few sounds today.
Headphones will make them easier to hear
if you're in a noisy place.
If you have those, I'd suggest you use them.
But, regardless of how you are listening,
I'd like to ask you to close your eyes.
If possible, I'd like you to keep them closed
for the beginning of this talk
for about five minutes, if you can, starting now.
Because this talk is about hearing underwater
where light degrades quickly
and where listening is the best way to gather information
about your surroundings,
and we humans experience this best by shutting our eyes
and paying attention to the information
that comes in through our ears.
If you hadn't seen me at the beginning of this talk,
what could you learn by listening?
Well you'd guess what I am.
Your brain would decode information,
from the pressure waves that are my voice,
to guess that I'm a woman of your species.
And since you're a sophisticated mammal,
you'd further guess that I'm American,
likely from the east coast.
Maybe you even hear that trace of my mother's New Jersey accent.
And you'd understand what I'm saying.
Beyond those basics, our common language would
encode the complex information content
that I want to pass on to you today.
It would also include those signals about
my state, my age, my health, my emotions.
If we were in a room together,
you'd know where I am.
Your ears and brain,
with some help from the movement of your head,
would decode directionality from my voice.
They would also work together to estimate how far away I am,
and they would do this with even more accuracy
if you're visually impaired.
Beyond listening to me,
if you were to unplug your headphones,
listen to the space you're sitting in right now,
you'd know a lot about that space without looking.
If it's a room,
you'd guess whether there are other people there with you.
You'd guess whether the ceilings are high or low,
whether the floor has carpet or not.
A visually impaired person has learned to
paint the environment around them in their mind
using what they hear.
We can get all of that from our hearing,
as we're mammals that have done a lot of our evolving in air
with visual cues as our dominant information source.
But for marine animals,
vision is not providing as much information.
Sound is traveling over four times faster than it would in air,
and thus, it's both a necessary and efficient way
to use sound for information.
The more we study marine animals,
the more we are discovering that sensitivity and use of sound
is more a rule than an exception,
and that communication by producing sounds,
either vocally or with body parts,
is common across diverse taxonomic groups
of invertebrates, fish, and mammals.
So, what does it sound like down there.
Although there's a lot of variation,
there are three components
to what we hear when we listen underwater.
First there are sounds made by the physical environment.
These can include wind and waves.
(wind and wave sounds)
Rain.
(rain)
And then there are the sounds made by animals,
from invertebrates, like snapping shrimp,
(snapping shrimp sounds)
fish,
(fish noises)
small toothed whale.
(small toothed whale screech)
Some of the largest animals in the world:
(baleen whale song)
the baleen whale.
(baleen whale song)
And finally, in most of the world's places,
there are sounds made by people,
including by our boats, small and large,
our fisheries,
and our research,
among many others.
(high pitched hum).
You can open your eyes.
Let's imagine, that we wanted to compare how it sounds
in all the places where you're listening to this webinar today.
Let's say each of you
was responsible for making some measurements,
so that we could understand the similarities and differences
and what it sounds like around you.
Together, we would face the very questions,
if we were to do that,
that we faced in the Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring project.
The goal of this project was to measure underwater sound
in places as diverse as the remote waters of
the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument,
surrounding the northwestern Hawaiian archipelago,
to the sanctuaries that provide
coastal and offshore waters protection
off the east and the west coast of the United States
and to be able to compare the features of these places.
In each of them, we expected to hear
the many types of animals that make sound.
We also expected to hear
the many things that people do offshore there
and the sound of the physical environment.
In total, these features make up the place's soundscape,
and we set out to measure them in ways that could be
compared across the country.
To do this, we had to measure in the same way.
We set up instrumentation, sometimes using divers,
sometimes from boats, that we maintained periodically,
but that recorded information in the same way.
In a few places, we also used
autonomous vehicles, called gliders,
to listen on pre-programmed paths.
We then set about to measure
the same features from these recordings,
including their loudness, which we measure as intensity,
and their pitch or tone, which we measure as frequency.
And when we compare what we hear in different places,
we expect the differences and similarities
to reflect what is and is not making sound in those places,
but we also have to account for how the environment changes
what we can record in these places.
This animation shows
some of the variables that we have to account for.
This blue whale
is calling in deeper waters using very low tones, or pitches,
and its sound is traveling farther
and is being recorded on several of these yellow recorders,
but the dolphins, closer to the coast, in shallower water,
are making sounds with higher pitches,
and those sounds are only being recorded
on a nearby yellow recorder.
So, we learn that the pitch, or the frequency of the sound,
as well as the environment, like how deep the water is,
affects what we hear in any one place where we record.
We can use our understanding of how far away
we can hear different sounds under different conditions
to predict the area over which we're monitoring.
These maps help us interpret the information
we get from our recorders,
telling us how representative each is of a wider area surrounding it.
You can see here, these areas can be very different
for sounds with different pitches.
These maps are of a recorder
on the northside of Santa Rosa Island
in the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary
off Southern California,
and they show you that this lower pitched sound, at 63 hertz,
had lower pitch sounds over a larger area
contributed to that recorder.
But sounds a bit higher in pitch, at 1,000 hertz,
came from a much more local area, on the left.
So these were the guiding principles
for comparing features of sound, over
long time periods and over great distances,
that were the heart of the SanctSound project,
and the portal provides
educational information about all of them.
So, I think we'll head there now.
To sanctsound.ioos.us.
And all of the visuals that i just showed, and more,
are available through the portal's six tutorials
that are accessed by these questions:
why and how did we listen;
what did we measure;
what did we learn;
where and when do we listen;
what do we hear
and who are we.
Let's begin by choosing a place
from this interactive map.
Here are the sanctuaries where we recorded.
Let's head to the central California coastline on the west coast
and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
When we select this spot,
we see an acoustic scene of all of the sources of sound
that we identified during the project
in this sanctuary soundscape.
We can choose one of them.
Let's choose this humpback whale.
For each of these, we can listen to a recording
of that animal in that place,
and we can look at when this source was identified –
these humpback whales were heard
in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
We can look at that time series on the bottom
and number of times we heard that animal
on the y-axis as a chart.
We can also look at it as a cyclical plot, a clock plot,
that shows the months of the year going around in a circle
and the times of the year when we heard more humpback whales
have peaks of sound out from the center of the circle.
You can see we heard more humpback whales
in the fall and the winter months in Monterey Bay.
Let's say you're particularly interested in humpback whales,
and you want to know where else
in the sanctuary system we heard them.
Clicking here will allow you to go more deeply into the portal.
And what you'll see, are all the locations
where we heard humpback whales
and the times of the year in which we heard them.
For each of the sounds that we identified in this project,
these menus will allow you to see whether
we heard them in just a few places, or in many,
and where we heard them in many places, you can compare
when we heard them during the year, and for some,
even what time of day we heard them.
Ok, so let's head back to those
sanctuary overview pages again.
Make our way to a different sanctuary.
Let's choose the east coast United States
at Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary
in coastal Massachusetts.
Here you see a different acoustic scene
with the sources that were identified in this sanctuary soundscape.
Let's click on "where did we listen."
You'll see a map of that sanctuary.
Each of the locations where we were recording are identified,
and if you click on them, it tells you a small amount
about why we selected that site.
This site, 01, was selected
because we heard Atlantic cod there
and because it was a place with a lot of vessel activity.
We show you an example of how far we could hear.
This example is for lower frequencies
in the month of April in the springtime.
You can see we hear over
quite a large area of the sanctuary and beyond
at those lower frequencies in the spring,
and you can see that we monitored
almost continuously at this site
over the three plus years of monitoring effort there.
Ok, and what did we hear?
Under "what did we measure," we summarize
the features of that sanctuary soundscape.
The first summarization is a spectrogram,
which is time on the x-axis and frequency on the y-axis,
with lower pitches, or tones, at the bottom
and higher pitches, or tones, at the top.
And this annotation shows you right away that the warmer colors,
which show louder sounds,
are mostly at the bottom of the spectrogram
over this long period of time.
Showing you the dominant features of the soundscape
are mostly at the lower pitches, or the lower tones.
If you look at this power spectrum,
it summarizes that same thing,
That now over frequencies getting higher and higher to the right
and loudness going up.
The middle and lower frequencies of the soundscape are dominant;
the higher frequencies are less so.
Was it like this all of the time?
These plots help you understand what this location was like on average,
but they also show you when it diverged from average,
and how often.
They show that despite the soundscape having
more dominant sounds in those lower frequencies,
the result of that near constant vessel presence,
there's a seasonal pattern in this place as well.
With the windy winters being generally louder
than the summers across many tones, or frequencies.
So, let's say you're now curious how this soundscape
compares to other soundscapes around the country.
For this, we would go, again, more deeply into the portal.
First, you can delve into each sanctuary's information.
Let's go back to Stellwagen for a moment
and look at that sound levels overview tab.
This shows you the same information
you were seeing summarized just a moment ago;
however, here, it is explorable.
By hovering, you can see the underlying data points,
and creating windows, you can pick out features of interest
and see them at higher resolution.
You can also look at specific pitches
that you might be the most interested in.
For those specific pitches, you can enlarge them.
You can change their binning to see them at finer resolution.
And for any of these data, you can download them,
and for each, you'll be given
a file, metadata, and citation information.
Ok, so let's get back to our question of being able to compare
this soundscape to another place.
To do that,
let's take a look at
down the east coast a little further, off the coast of Georgia,
to Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary.
And in this place, a temperate reef.
Let's take a look at that same sound levels overview page,
and right away, your eye can tell you
that this is a very different soundscape.
Where in Stellwagen, we were looking at warmth,
or louder sounds, at the bottom of the spectrogram,
now we're looking at those warm colors in
the middle and the higher frequencies of the spectrogram.
This is a sanctuary soundscape
that is dominated by biological sounds –
rich choruses of calling fish,
as well as snapping shrimp, critters of the reef.
So we can see that feature, of mid and higher frequency sounds,
in the power spectrum.
Now, the lower frequencies are not as dominant
as they were in Stellwagen,
and it's the higher frequencies,
over to the right, that are more dominant.
If we wanted to co-plot those two things,
so that we could see them together,
we can head to the power spectrum compare tool
and take a look at them on the same plot.
Here's that Gray's Reef location,
and here's that Stellwagen Bank location.
So, you can see over here to the far left,
that the menu allows you to compare
any of the places where we recorded
and take a look at these power spectra together,
and it shows you those two very different places –
the higher intensities of lower frequency sounds at Stellwagen
dropping off at the higher frequencies,
versus the more intense mid and higher frequencies
of the Gray's Reef temperate reef.
Ok, let's head back to the foyer again
to our overview pages.
Here, I wanted to show you we have curated
a series of stories and story maps
to show you how sound is being used
to help us answer questions that are important in sanctuaries.
Each of these short pieces explains
how we're using this information
either in a specific sanctuary or at the scale of the system.
To give you an example,
let's look at these stories
for how listening is helping us better understand
how humpback whales are using the Hawaiian archipelago,
from the vast waters of the
Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, to the
Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary.
Several of our stories showcase how listening
fills in information about where animals are,
especially during windy winters or in areas
where surveys off boats or planes are difficult.
This specific story shows in more depth how
information from whole choruses of humpback whales
can help managers estimate how many whales are in a place
and in different areas of the sanctuary and the monument.
At a different scale,
our national story about vessels
looks at how sound information,
gathered in a comparable way at a whole system level,
can help us answer questions about
patterns of visitation across that system.
This information can also
help us understand how much influence
noise from vessels is having on soundscapes across our system,
and how that influence changes over time.
Providing some examples
of the changes that we have seen during the COVID pandemic.
Let's say, you would like to build your own story.
So again, here, we'll head to the deeper portal,
and now we'll head off the west coast of the United States
to the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary –
the Pacific Northwest off the state of Washington.
And we'll look at this site that's in the northern sanctuary
near the shipping lanes that access
the ports of Seattle and Vancouver.
Let's take a look at the lower frequencies of sound
that are affected by the vessels
that are coming and going in that lane.
And what I want to show you,
is your ability to start to build your own story of interest.
So, selecting a frequency that is influenced by vessel noise.
Let's add that information to a data view.
Say, we're also interested in the
number of vessels that we counted
by listening for them going by our monitoring station.
Let's add that information as well to our data view.
And since killer whales are an animal
whose presence in a noisy environment
can be a protective concern,
let's also add the number of them that we heard to our data view.
And finally,
since we're really interested in vessels in this spot,
let's take another look at the data type
that the portal provides access to,
and that's the number of vessels
that were passing close by to our recorder
and were carrying on them a transponder
that's used in vessel tracking, called AIS.
We've summarized those counts
for every one of our recording locations.
And let's add that information to our data view as well.
And now, let's take a look at it.
So, this data view now brings together information about
sound levels, sound detections of an animal, as well as vessels,
as well as the number of vessels that were counted using AIS.
And they can be printed and saved
for you to start building your own stories.
If we head back to the home page,
we've also included some data views that show you
how you can integrate information from other sources
of monitoring in the oceans with information from sound.
These examples,
To give you an example of this,
let's look at this example from the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary
during a time period in August 2020 when Hurricane Laura
passed close to our recording station.
Here, we've drawn in wind information and wave information,
as well as our sound information.
So we can take a look at what we heard
during those peak winds recorded during the storm.
It's taking a minute to load, we'll give it a second.
The other data views, also on that home page,
show how this integration is now possible
between several of the portals that can be accessed at ioos.us.
Information from the environmental sensor data portals,
from the marine biological observation network,
and a few other examples,
including how temperature might relate to how fishes calling
in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary,
and examples of humpback whale arrival timing
at sanctuaries in the Pacific related to marine heat waves.
So, these are again just examples to show
that it is possible to draw these data sets together
and think about listening in addition to other observations.
So I want to close by heading back to where we started,
and showing you where the sounds are in these places.
In our sanctuary overview places,
you can listen to example sounds through these menus
of lots of different types of animals, human-made sources,
physical sources,
and then examples of what the soundscapes
are like in all of these national marine sanctuaries
that include many sources together.
So you can get a sense for the experience
of listening underwater in these places.
For an even fuller portfolio of the sounds that are available,
you can head to the data portal and the sound library.
Here, you'll be able to play 290 sounds
that were archived as part of this project.
Finally, I just want to head back to the slides for a minute.
To close by highlighting the incredibly large team of people
whose efforts created this information resource
and made it available.
Importantly, the US Navy provided funding and co-led this project.
It represents the collective efforts of a team
of field operators, scientists, data managers,
communication specialists, and web developers
from 24 institutions across the country who helped build it.
And we hope that you'll continue to investigate it,
and we intend to grow it and continue to apply it
in our management of national marine sanctuaries.
And with that, I think I'll turn it over to Claire.
- Excellent, thank you for that Dr Leila Hatch.
Appreciate it.
Before we go to questions,
I wanted to spend just a little bit of time
letting our audience know about our new resource collections,
which as part of our 50th anniversary campaign,
we've been launching, about once a month,
these really robust resource collections that include
videos and virtual reality content, lesson plans,
background information, web stories, infographics, etc.
So here's a snapshot of, we have six now,
but here's four of them that we are offering,
and Chloe's going to go ahead and put the link in.
And one in particular
that Dr Hatch and her extended team helped out with
was our Ocean Sound and Impact of Noise resource collection.
So, let's go ahead and explore that a little bit more
since we have a segment of time here.
So as I mentioned, we now have six of them.
So, we just launched kelp forest ecosystems yesterday,
and last week we launched our ocean acidification.
So, we had a couple this month
that we're playing catch-up on.
But let's dig a little bit deeper
into our Ocean Sound and Impact of Noise.
So, lots of the background information,
some of which Leila touched on,
can be found in this collection.
For example,
if you go to the sound monitoring project overview page,
you will see the link to that SanctSound data portal
that she spent time going into,
and you can see lots of information,
including the story map and web stories.
So there's going to be a whole number of places
that you can get this content.
Let's talk about lessons related to sound and bioacoustics.
We have this great lesson here,
which is grades three through five,
on how increased ocean noise affects whales,
and you can see what some of the
learning objectives are for students.
Another one, this one from, I believe, our
Olympic Coast Sanctuary.
Maybe I can even make these larger.
Understanding and be able to hypothesize about
the reasons that whales make vocalizations
and why they depend on hearing rather than vision.
You get to listen to those vocalizations,
and there's lots of other great learning objectives there.
We've had several of these distance learning live events
that have focused on sound, passive acoustic monitoring,
humpback whales revealed through
acoustics in our Hawaiian archipelago,
listening to "see" beneath the waves using soundscape monitoring
in the Channel Islands.
So, these are all one hour live events,
like you're participating in right now
but recordings of them.
We have a whole slew of Earth is Blue
and other related NOAA and national marine sanctuary videos
on sound and soundscapes.
So, this is where you would get the link for many of those.
Leila mentioned many of the web stories
that can also be found in that SactSound data portal.
And then we have this sort of catch-all category
on additional material related to sound.
Gray's Reef hydrophone virtual dive,
boat visitation at Gray's Reef story map,
NOAA's ocean noise strategy engagement, etc.
So, these are collections that we encourage
our educators and interested public
to explore and learn more about,
and certainly, as we continue developing a variety of topics,
you can find a lot of the content here,
and the link should be in our
chat here.
So, with that, why don't we go ahead and get some questions.
So let's see.
Chloe why don't you kick it off with a question here.
- Yes I see one that says,
have you been able to make many recordings
from very deep water offshore in Hawaii in the
Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
- In this project,
we actually were seeking to fill in some of the gaps
in our shallower water listening knowledge
in some of our sanctuaries.
We have partnership projects that are also really important,
both in NOAA and with partners outside of NOAA,
that have provided a real wealth of deeper water information.
And in the monument, specifically,
we recorded beyond the shallower water locations
where we had placed our hydrophones
during the course of SanctSound
with a wave glider that swam a course of
over 2,600 nautical miles for 67 days in the monument
to try to cover more of the listening area of that place,
but we didn't have any deeper water recorders in place
during the time period.
- Kind of a follow-up to that,
also like geological sounds, deep sea vents,
anything captured to that extent for this project?
- We haven't honed in on the
very, very low frequencies of seismic as much,
and that is the movement of the earth's crust
that often can be detected on hydrophones
and studied using hydrophones
as much during this project.
- And actually, before we go to the next question,
I wanted to see, Dr. Hatch, are you interested
in launching any of these poll questions?
We might have considered doing them earlier,
but we have one –
what content from the SanctSound portal are you most interested in?
Should I launch that poll question for our audience,
and then we'll get back to our Q&A?
- That'd be great!
- Ok, let's go ahead and do that.
Oops, I've got to select the question.
If you happen to be in full screen mode,
you're going to have to pop out of that to actually see the poll.
Alright, looks like folks are voting here, so we'll give them
a few seconds to register their vote.
- Yes, we were interested in asking this
not just for how the portal exists today
but because of combinations of partners
who are interested in growing what it does,
and so it's nice to get some increasing understanding
of what folks are interested in.
- Alright we've got a good percentage that have voted,
and voting slowed,
so I'm going to go ahead and close it and share the results.
And are you able to see that, Dr. Hatch?
If not, I can...
- I am, yeah that's great!
- Excellent, so it looks like nearly half are interested in the
graphics and visualization and story element.
Ok.
- The second poll.
- Great, thank you.
- What do you think?
- Yeah let's do the second one.
Let's do the second one.
No, I think they're kind of a pair,
and then we'll be done.
- Ok, excellent.
So in this case,
what is your primary use for the SanctSound portal?
I'd love to hear from you.
Alright, half of you voted,
so the other half is either trying to figure out how to vote
or thinking about their response.
- It's true, if you're if your interest is in being able to
hear sounds and just explore it for general use,
then there's not a category for that.
- We'll consider adding that next time.
- Exactly.
- Alrigh, let's go ahead.
Voting has slowed,
and here are the results.
So, as suspected, you know,
our audience is primarily made up of educators,
so we've got 35% suggesting the education realm,
but then right below that, monitoring and research, so, excellent.
- That's great, thank you.
- Yeah.
Alright, there was another good question that had come in.
What is the percentage of sounds/signals
that you can assign to a distinct source or event,
and which cannot yet be assigned?
- I don't know if I can get to percentage.
There are soundscapes that have been studied for longer,
and where some of that sleuthing has resulted in,
over time, chipping away at the unknowns,
and there are other places where we're just beginning.
I will say that our fishes
continue to be a very tricky space.
There are a lot of soniferous,
that means sound producing fishes,
and understanding which of them is
making the sounds that we're listening to
in a lot of these shallow water environments
is very much a work in progress.
So, we hear a lot of sounds that we know are biologic,
and a lot of the time, we are still categorizing them to
and identifying who's producing them.
The other category is human-caused sounds.
There continue to be a collection of human-caused sounds
that we are pretty sure are categorized as not biologic in source,
but there are often new things being added to the mix,
that take a little while to identify,
and we heard some things that we didn't expect in this project
and expect that to continue.
- Someone was wondering if there are any plans
for doing soundscapes in the Great Lakes sanctuary.
- Yes, we are very interested in the Great Lakes.
We have sanctuaries obviously in our Great Lakes,
and we have interest in,
although they are are quite focused
on the maritime heritage resources within these sanctuaries –
that is shipwrecks
and the cultural heritage around those shipwrecks.
They also do harbor really rich ecology,
some of which is sound-producing.
There are also other uses for sound
in the context of some of these resources
that are really interesting for sanctuary management.
We often are interested in what kinds of
vessel visitations there are around wrecks
and in places that we are managing,
and like I was showing with the sounds we're recording of vessels,
this can be a good way to to add to our measurements
of visitation in these places.
- There's a question here:
How can these data systems account for
different acoustic propagation paths in the ocean?
- Yes.
I started to talk about listening areas,
and in my short time today,
I didn't have a whole lot of a chance to show,
to highlight the work that is being done in this project
to look at acoustic propagation paths.
I think I won't go all the way back to sharing my screen.
- Ok.
- But in each of those tabs across the top,
you can look at the listening maps associated with
different frequencies and different times of year
for each of the recording areas.
So, we talked about how that's a really important,
the range over which you can hear different sounds
at different times of the year
is a really important component to integrate,
particularly with detections.
That is, how many of a certain signal type did you hear,
as it helps you understand how large an area you were sampling,
especially if you then want to compare it to another area
that might have a different distance over which it was sampling.
If you have a higher number at one
and a lower number at the other, you need to be able to
integrate your information about listening space
to know whether that higher number was because
there were more animals, or because you could hear further.
So, that's one example,
is the integration with detection information
that helps us calibrate our understandings
of what's in a soundscape
and make closer to one-to-one comparisons about
what is going on in the monitoring areas around each recorder.
- There are a lot of great questions coming in.
Someone just asked:
is there any of this data in Puget Sound,
specifically the straits?
They are very interested in ship noise
and how that impacts the southern resident orcas.
- Yes, there is great work being done with
sound monitoring in Puget Sound
by NOAA's Northwest Fisheries Science Center and partners,
as well as on the Canadian side by the
Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
In this work, we were focused in the
Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary,
which is in the offshore waters outside puget sound,
where we have offshore feeding activity by killer whales.
So, we're sort of looking at a different part
of their feeding environment and habitat,
but that work is available,
and we can absolutely put folks in touch
with how to get access to it.
- This is an interesting one.
We clearly have an artist
that is participating in today's live event.
- Cool.
- And in that poll, as an artist,
she had selected outreach and communication
as what she's interested in with this,
and her question is –
do you have any thoughts of how
artists can play a role in using this data?
- Well, I can tell you first that
we were highly dependent on a fabulous artist
who helped us with a lot of the visualizations that you saw today,
so I think art helped us.
And then the second is
how can art help teach lessons about sound, absolutely.
Beyond what the graphic design work
that was done for this project for the portal,
visualization of what you hear is a really important way
of talking to people who are very visual.
So, in the beginning of the talk,
we closed our eyes to focus on what we hear,
the other way to do it is to try to make sound,
a more visual understanding for for those of us who are
dominantly taking in information that way,
so a lot of work in this project has gone into
thinking about how to how to do that,
and we could use all the help we can get.
- I don't think we've gotten to this one.
Someone asked earlier:
why are the winters louder than the summers underwater
in Stellwagen Bank?
- Yes, I'm sitting in Boston, Massachusetts,
where the winds are beginning to die down,
and I can tell you that the answer is because our
northern latitude winters are windier,
and wind generates quite a bit of sound underwater.
It is a dominant source of underwater sound
at lower to middle frequencies in soundscapes,
and in places where you have a lot of wind
and windier conditions, or on average there is more wind,
you're going to hear more of that background.
When it dies down, on average,
doesn't mean there's not going to be windy days here and there,
but on average, it's less windy in the summer.
- Excellent.
Well, let's go ahead.
We're going to wrap up our Q&A portion of today's live event,
so thank you so much, Dr. Hatch, for those questions.
I wanted to let our audience know
some of the details of how things wrap up here.
So, don't worry about this long url.
We're typical government, right.
Everything's long, and
we will be sending a follow-up email,
so all live attendees and all registrants
will get this webinar archive link
when today's live event is posted online.
If you have any follow-up questions,
you're welcome to send them to sanctuary.education@noaa.gov,
and all participants in today's live event,
and any of those that watch the recording
and have gotten to this point
are going to be receiving a certificate of attendance.
Here's an example of one from late last year,
and this will give you one contact hour
of professional development.
And I know some questions about that came through the chat,
so here's the answer.
And I did want to just promo a couple of more
distance learning experiences that we have
for this week and next week.
Well actually,
I'm just promo-ing the two more this week.
So, we'll be doing a virtual field trip to the Channel Islands,
and actually, it's going to be Julie Bursek from the
Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary and myself,
and this is scheduled for tomorrow at 4 pm Pacific.
Join us for that highly visual field trip.
And then, hosted by our Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument team,
they'll be offering our Mission Iconic Reefs:
An Ambitious Plan to Restore Seven Sites in
the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary,
so that will be happening soon.
And as we start to conclude today's webinar,
I wanted to let you know that there will be a short evaluation.
We'd love to hear from you about today's live presentation
and your likelihood of joining us in the future.
If you are an educator, and you haven't already participated in
the NOAA Multimedia Needs Assessment version 2.0,
then please click the link that's in our evaluation,
and let us know.
We want to make sure that we're providing content and videos
and web materials that will help educators and others
bring ocean and climate literacy
into your classroom and your facilities.
So with that, we'll conclude today's live presentation.
Thank you so much Dr. Leila Hatch for joining us
and Chloe for being my co-host
and for all of you, our audience members, for learning more
about our underwater parks
and exploring underwater sound in our sanctuaries.
So with that, we'll conclude today's live event.
Take care.