Automated acoustic tracking of aquatic animals: scales, design and deployment of listening station arrays

By M. Heupel, J. Semmens, A. Hobday. 2006

613 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent introduction of low-cost, moored data-logging acoustic receivers has provided opportunities for tracking marine organisms over small (hundreds of metres) and large scales (hundreds of kilometres). Acoustic receivers have been deployed in many different environments to examine specific hypotheses regarding the movement of aquatic species. This technology provides many advantages for studying aquatic animal movement patterns, but also has limitations and provides unique difficulties for users. Study design, applications, advantages and limitations are discussed with examples from past and current studies. Data management and analysis techniques are in their infancy and few standardised techniques exist. Complications with data management and potential data analysis techniques are discussed. Examples from the literature are utilised wherever possible to provide useful references.

Subfields: Developmental Biology, Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d81029c215b7ebc44d8315f7ecef332d41e6bd84

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In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Approaches to resolving cephalopod movement and migration patterns (2007, background): “This technology is becoming increasingly popular for examining the movement of a wide variety of fish and shark species (see Heupel et al. 2006).”
Variation in the performance of acoustic receivers and its implication for positioning algorithms in a riverine setting (2008, background): “Some of these species may create sounds that interfere with signal reception (Heupel et al. 2006).”
Freshwater and marine migration and survival of endangered Cultus Lake sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) smolts using POST, a large-scale acoustic telemetry array (2009, background): “The development and continued miniaturization of uniquely coded acoustic tags in the last decade holds the promise of allowing major advances in marine research (Voegeli et al. 1998, 2001; Heupel et al. 2006).”
Biotelemetry and biologging in endangered species research and animal conservation: relevance to regional, national, and IUCN Red List threat assessments (2008, neutral): “Increasingly, telemetry arrays have been deployed, enabling far more continuous monitoring of animals (Heupel et al. 2006), sometimes in 3 dimensions.”
Passive acoustic telemetry reveals highly variable home range and movement patterns among unicornfish within a marine reserve (2011, background): “Quantifying movement of reef fishes has benefited from the rapid evolution of acoustic telemetry (Heupel et al. 2006).”
Environmental interference factors affecting detection range in acoustic telemetry studies using fixed receiver arrays (2014, neutral): “…and deployment of multiple acoustic tags) can interfere with signal transmission and cause patterns in detections that could be mis - interpreted as movement of tagged individuals (Heupel et al. 2006, Kuperman & Roux 2007, Simp - fendorfer et al. 2008, Payne et al. 2010, Topping & Szedlmayer 2011).”
Tracking animals in freshwater with electronic tags: past, present and future (2013, background): “Abiotic Deep water Deep water attenuates radio signals [35,36] and mak es use of radio transmitters and PIT tags ineffective for positioning (in the latter case by virtue of the cu rrent difficulty of deploying PIT antennae at depth, thou gh technically feasible if linked in situ with waterproofed l”
Multi-scale patterns of habitat use in a highly mobile reef fish, the white trevally Pseudocaranx dentex, and their implications for marine reserve design (2009, background): “Spurious detection can occur whenever signals from different coded transmitters are emitted simultaneously within the same detection range, resulting in ‘false’ signals (Heupel et al. 2006).”
The Use of Electronic Tags in Fish Research - An Overview of Fish Telemetry Methods (2013, background): “Receivers can for instance be placed at strategic sites, in a grid format, or can be placed in transects so fish passing from one area to another will be recorded (Heupel et al., 2006).”
Ghosts in the data: false detections in VEMCO pulse position modulation acoustic telemetry monitoring equipment (2015, methodology): “Animal detection data from receivers are used to generate information on movements, residency, behaviour, and many other ecological aspects [5].”
Importance of environmental and biological drivers in the presence and space use of a reef‑associated shark (2014, background): “Absences were likely the re - sult of 2 processes: (1) the movement of sharks away from Heron Island Reef, and (2) the inability of the equipment to detect the presence of sharks due to the interference of these environmental factors (Heupel et al. 2006).”
Site fidelity and seasonal movement patterns of adult California sheephead Semicossyphus pulcher (Labridae) : an acoustic monitoring study (2006, methodology): “…patterns, with results becoming comparable to those obtained via laborious manual telemetry or via expensive high-resolution radio-acoustic positioning and telemetry (VRAP) methods (Bradbury et al. 1995, O’Dor et al. 2002, Simpfendorfer et al. 2002, Parsons et al. 2003, Heupel et al. 2004, 2006).”
Personality-dependent spatial ecology occurs independently from dispersal in wild burbot (Lota lota) (2015, methodology): “receiver were eliminated by the use of a minimum of 2 detections per 24-h period filter (Heupel et al. 2006).”
Developing a Mechanistic Understanding of Fish Migrations by Linking Telemetry with Physiology, Behavior, Genomics and Experimental Biology: An Interdisciplinary Case Study on Adult Fraser River Sockeye Salmon (2008, background): “…and the demand for other low power electronics have made it possible to deploy very-large scale and permanent acoustic (e.g., Welch et al. 2002; Heupel et al. 2006) and radio (e.g., English et A research team member surgically implants an acoustic telemetry transmitter into an adult sockeye…”