Our Technology: Empowering Marine Conservation through Cutting-Edge Bioacoustics
Imagine being able to help protect sensitive marine habitats like coral reefs by listening to their underwater soundscapes. FishEye Collaborative is helping to turn this into reality, developing groundbreaking solutions to help people manage protected areas and fisheries. This can be achieved by decoding those soundscapes with new recording technologies and by deploying hydrophones (underwater microphones). Let’s look at the steps FishEye is taking to bridge the gap between raw underwater sounds and robust conservation strategies.
The UPAC-360 system provides full spatial audio and panoramic visuals.
1. Innovative Underwater Acoustic Cameras
At the heart of our work is the design of our state-of-the-art underwater passive acoustic camera. The FishEye UPAC-360 system is an all-new way to decode marine soundscapes, enabling us to precisely associate specific sounds with their sources, and giving technicians a full spatial audio and 360° visual picture. Our underwater acoustic cameras can cover much larger areas compared to previous methods, allowing us to capture a larger 360º audio-visual record of marine life in its natural habitat. We’re continuing research and development on the next generation of our technologies, representing major improvements on our first-generation model.
2. Powerful Computing for Massive Data Processing
Back on shore, we use powerful computing to handle the enormous amounts of data collected, allowing our scientists to assign each sound to individual fish, build repertoires for each species, and identify associated behaviors. Just like birds and mammals, we are finding that every species makes its own distinctive sound. This association of sounds with species is the crucial step in transforming raw data into classified fish-sound collections that we can use in sound libraries.
3. Building Extensive Sound Libraries
FishEye Collaborative's rapidly growing collections of recordings of individual sonorous fish species represent a unique contribution to conservation bioacoustics. These libraries include sounds captured under different conditions and behavioral contexts, providing a rich repertoire of behaviors that give insight beyond just presence or absence. Having a large number of correctly classified recordings is vital for training machine learning models, ensuring that they can accurately identify species and behaviors from other underwater recordings in the future.
4. Training Advanced Machine Learning Models
Our sound libraries can be used to manually identify sounds but, for the long time series needed for ecosystem monitoring, AI will be crucial for finding meaningful patterns. That’s why machine learning will be key for unlocking FishEye’s innovation. The Cornell team is developing these AI methods now, and we look forward to collaborating with researchers around the world who will use our library to advance this area of research.
5. Deploying Inexpensive Hydrophones in the Field
One of FishEye’s goals is to make it possible to deploy and use inexpensive devices to record local soundscapes. Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) devices are hydrophones that are connected to a recorder, usually in a self-contained housing with batteries that last days to months. Arrays of PAM devices make it feasible to monitor entire areas. Acoustic monitoring can be used to support other kinds of monitoring and it has distinct advantages over other methods (visual surveys, eDNA). It can cost less and it minimizes environmental impact, making large-scale monitoring projects more sustainable.
Together with our partners at the Sexton Corporation and FORTH, we are developing a new kind of PAM device called FinDrop. It is designed to increase reliability, simplify deployment, and reduce the cost of underwater sound recording. The first fifteen units are now in use by us and by partner teams around the world helping us test and refine the system in field conditions. FinDrop uses a digital MEMS microphone array protected by a proprietary acoustic membrane that enables high-quality recordings at depths of up to 200 meters. This design has built-in redundancy and enables increased clarity and noise reduction with post-processing, allowing researchers to capture detailed underwater soundscapes for less than a device based around a traditional hydrophone. These early deployments will help shape the final system for broader use in conservation and monitoring.
Initial funding for FinDrop development came from Wildlabs. The FinDrop prototypes were funded by Synchro.
6. Delivering Actionable Data to Decision-Makers
The final step in the process is using AI algorithms to transform these underwater recordings into actionable insights that can be used by managers and scientists. Our goal is to provide clear, precise, and timely information about habitat health and biodiversity. This data will help decision-makers implement effective conservation strategies, helping protect sensitive marine habitats and fisheries around the world for future generations.
Conservation
Fish conservation is not just about preserving biodiversity. According to the World Bank(1) “Including subsistence and secondary-sector workers, and their dependents, it is estimated that about 600 million livelihoods depend at least partially on fisheries and aquaculture. Most are in developing countries, and are small-scale artisanal fishers and fish farmers.” At FishEye Collaborative, we see Passive Acoustic Monitoring as a key tool in the effort to maintain and regrow depleted coastal fisheries.
According to the Coral Reef Alliance(2) , over a billion people worldwide—in over half the world’s nations— depend on coral reefs not only economically, but for the protection of their coastlines.(3)
Identifying spawning grounds and times
Many important fisheries populations breed in mass spawning events, making them extremely vulnerable to fishing pressure. Protecting these events can be challenging and they sometimes occur in areas that are not legally protected. Most of them are noisy affairs, however, and where we know the sounds of the species, we can move to update legislation to protect their spawning grounds.
Defining and monitoring marine protected areas
Marine Protected Areas (MPA) are a central strategy in the global effort to conserve marine biodiversity. They not only protect nature, but also grow harvests for surrounding communities. But MPAs are hard to enforce and it is difficult to measure their impact. PAM with verified ID will allow authorities to learn whether their efforts are growing the populations and if abundance is spilling into surrounding waters as expected.
Apart from creating nutritional value, MPAs can create opportunities for ecotourism, often generating more revenue and jobs for communities than through consumption or extraction. In many areas around the world, coral reefs also have a profound cultural importance.
Detecting illegal activities
Fishing boats are noisy, and so is dynamite fishing. That means passive acoustics can detect illegal fishing and destructive methods. The low-cost PAM devices that we are developing are designed to enable more communities to detect and combat these practices.
Our Work
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Research
FishEye Collaborative’s research is all about improving PAM techniques so they work better for fish and other less commonly studied organisms. Most marine PAM work is on whales. Therefore, most PAM technology and methods have been developed to meet those needs. But PAM is possible for any animal that makes sound. Underwater, that means fish, turtles, crustaceans, and maybe more. The methods, tools, and sound library we are creating will help open this area for more study.
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