Originally published by SECOORA

From whale songs to boat noise, the ocean is loud, and for years, the only way to make sense of it was for researchers to listen to every second of it themselves.

That changed with a SECOORA-funded initiative, Augmenting Ocean Observing through Artificial Intelligence, led by Dr. Luke McEachron and a team spanning Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission, University of South Florida College of Marine Science‘s Institute for Marine Remote Sensing, the University of South Carolina-Beaufort‘s Marine Sensory and Neurobiology Lab, and the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. Instead of building a machine learning model from scratch, the team adapted an existing bioacoustic AI framework to detect boat noise based on thousands of hours of underwater recordings. The AI model is 88-90% accurate.

The results of this work led to the SECOORA AI Gateway, a resource hub that lets any lab or agency apply AI to their own passive acoustic monitoring data through free, cloud-hosted notebooks.The same technology is now helping restore Florida’s coral reefs, from AI-triggered spawning alerts at The Florida Aquarium to an autonomous data buoy tracking reef life in the Florida Keys.Read the full story to see how this work is changing the pace of ocean science: https://lnkd.in/euCQPdVQ. The data buoy is also being supported by funding from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Coral Protection and Restoration Program and all work was completed under appropriate permits from FDEP, FKNMS, and the Army Corps of Engineers. The U.S. Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON) is co-organized by NOAA, NASA, BOEM, and ONR through the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP).