Task 1

Bibliographic review and questionnaires to marine mammal researchers

ACCURATE begun with a comprehensive bibliographic research and contacting researchers involved in PAM work to understand existing published and unpublished data sources.

Some datasets containing relevant information that were otherwise being ignored, or had not yet been processed for the purposes of estimating acoustic cue rates were identified, and some of these processed.

Different methods for cue rate estimation, existence of different types of cue rates and optimal choice of cues were investigated.

The outcome of this first task will be a user-friendly reference/data repository that enables Navy users to find the most appropriate cue rate to select in PAM-DE efforts for a given priority species and area, made freely available to the wider community.

This has also allowed the identification of priority areas where there is currently insufficient knowledge that might form the basis of future investment in cue rate estimation.

All of this knowledge gathered is also being incorporated into a review manuscript about marine mammla cue production rates to inform passive acoustic density estimation exercises.

Team members

• Tiago Marques
• Danielle Harris
• Cormac Booth
• Miriam Rodrigues
• Diana Marques
• Carolina Marques
• Kalliopi Gkikopoulou

Progress

Watch this space for further task updates.

• Informal questionnaires sent out to researchers tagging marine mammals
• Prompt for feedback on tagging efforts via MARMMAM post
• Online search of all marine mammals completed using Web of Knowledge, Google Scholar and Google
• Production of an exhaustive dedicated list of references that include marine mammal cue rate facts, with links to available DOIs for all references.
• Draft manuscript prepared on review of marine mammal acoustic cue production

Searching for cue rate information

We conducted a systematic search for references that could potentially contain cue rate relevant information. For each marine mammal species, we conducted Google, Google Scholar and Web of Knowledge searches with different search criteria. Here we report on the most stringent one, over Web of Knowledge.

For each species the following seach was conducted:

(“Species latin” OR “species common”) AND

(“sound” OR “acoustic”)

AND (“focal” OR “tag”)

This resulted in a total of 737 references with potential cue rate information. We then proceeded to further filter each reference to identify if there were actual cue rates reported, or if potentially cue rate relevant information might be present. A small number of papers not retrieved from this search but which were found in any other ad hoc way (e.g. the team was aware they existed but had been missed on the search) were also added to the list. This led to a considerable reduction of references including cue rate facts, 90 references, generating 172 cue rate facts, over 34 species.

Most of the cue rate information arose from tagging studies, with a few notable exceptions with focal follows, combination of acoustic data with independent density estimates and estimates from tracking experiments within Navy ranges 8for these latter cases, the main hurdle is that while these provide “along track” cue rates, they do not (yet?) allow to account for silence periods and/or silent animals.

A key aspect to highlight is that for the vast majority of marine mammal species there is no information about cue production rates, rendering efforts to estimate their abundance from passive acoustic data hopeless. On the other hand, most of the facts found come from a dozen species, and the remaining species having, at best, scarse/partial information on cue rates.

The resulting final list of references considered to contain relevant cue rates is here.

We are working to produce also a detailed list of the facts available from those references, so that people looking for cue rate facts, say for a given speciees, can quickly find all the available relevant refereces and corresponding facts.

Please help us updating the references/facts list!

We have made an effort to gather an exaustive list of references and facts, making it an useful first stop for those looking for references about cue rate production information for marine mammals.

However, the literature is so large it is likely we might have missed some relevant references.

If you browse the list above and happen to know about references that might have cue rate relevant information that are not listed there, we would really appreciate if you could get in contact with us and let us know about it.

If you have produced cue rates before we would be immensely grateful if you could check the list and let us know if we missed something.

Feel free to drop a line to Tiago Marques (tiago.marques at st-andrews.ac.uk) for new additions to this list, and many thanks in advance for any information that gets sent our way.