Biology subjects

Parcerisas, C.

Publications and source records attributed to Parcerisas, C..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

BioDCASE: Using data challenges to make community advances in computational bioacoustics

Computational bioacoustics has seen significant advances in recent decades. However, the rate of insights from automated analysis of bioacoustic audio lags behind our rate of collecting the data - due to key capacity constraints in data annotation and bioacoustic algorithm development. Gaps in analysis methodology persist: not because they are intractable, but because of resource limitations in the bioacoustics community. To bridge these gaps, we advocate the open science method of data challenges, structured as public contests. We conducted a bioacoustics data challenge named BioDCASE, within the format of an existing event (DCASE). In this work we report on the procedures needed to select and then conduct useful bioacoustics data challenges. We consider aspects of task design such as dataset curation, annotation, and evaluation metrics. We report the three tasks included in BioDCASE 2025 and the resulting progress made. Based on this we make recommendations for open community initiatives in computational bioacoustics.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Echosounders for fish detection disturb harbour porpoises

The marine world is an acoustic world that has become noisier with the increasing diversity and intensity of human activities at sea. The harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) is one of the best-studied cetaceans regarding hearing and responses to human-made underwater sound. The species is most sensitive to high frequencies, yet most impact studies have focused on relatively low-frequency sources. As such, the effects of high frequency sonar - including echosounders - remain largely unstudied, despite their widespread use on vessels for depth sounding, fish or object detection, and seabed mapping. We investigated the effects of scientific echosounder use on harbour porpoise occurrence using 13 multi-sensor mooring deployments in the southern part of the North Sea. Moorings operated for an average of 57 days, with split-beam scientific echosounders active for an average of 51 days, for 10 minutes every hour (5 min at 70 kHz, followed by 5 min at either 185-255 kHz or 70 kHz again). Porpoise acoustic presence was continuously monitored with C/F-PODs and additionally validated with hydrophone detections at four of the locations. Across all 13 sites, detections declined by 65- 79% during echosounder transmissions and returned to typical levels within [~]30 minutes after the echosounder stopped pinging. Despite this relatively quick recovery, there was no indication of habituation, as responses did not diminish across observation periods over six weeks of hourly exposure. Spatial effects appeared local, as no deterrent effect was observed at 2.5 km from the source. We believe that our findings have important implications for studies that investigate both harbour porpoise and fish presence to understand predator-prey interactions, but they should also raise concern about the potentially cumulative impact on sensitive cetaceans from the wide use of relatively high frequency sonar in offshore practices.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2025

Big Data, Sound Science, Lasting Impact: a framework for passive acoustic monitoring

Marine passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has produced petabytes of data that are used by researchers, resource managers, industry, and regulators to understand how marine animals use sound and the impacts of anthropogenic noise on species and ecosystems throughout the global ocean. These big data provide unprecedented opportunities to study underwater soundscapes and marine ecology but also enormous challenges to efficiently extract information. To address these challenges, a U.S. federally funded and led Sound Cooperative (SoundCoop) project built community-focused cyberinfrastructure to promote improved, scalable and sustainable processing and access of marine PAM data for management, science, industry and military applications. Driven by cross-institutional participation representing a diversity of data collection methods and conditions, the SoundCoop project established guidance for standardized processing of ocean sound level metrics using freeware software toolkits and developed core tools and processes that support open science. Four examples of comparative analyses that connect disparate PAM monitoring efforts, and integrate non-acoustic data illustrate how comparable, interoperable sound level metrics support a more coherent and synoptic perspective on global ocean soundscapes using methods that current and future PAM projects can leverage. Such a framework around PAM big data offers the opportunity to revolutionize large-scale marine ecology and oceanography in similar ways to other transformative approaches for understanding environmental or ecological patterns and processes at global scales.

ecology↗