In a recent deployment off the coast of Cape Sable, Nova Scotia, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and JASCO Applied Sciences (JASCO), successfully demonstrated the ability to detect and localize marine mammals using a fleet of Slocum autonomous underwater gliders.
The gliders were deployed in Roseway Basin on the Scotian Shelf, a region recognized as a critical habitat for endangered and at-risk marine mammals. Two DFO gliders and one JASCO glider were equipped with JASCO’s OceanObserver™ directional Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) system.
The OceanObserver™ system on each glider detected a fixed sound source and marine mammal vocalizations and estimated the bearing (direction) of those sounds. The real-time directional detections were used to estimate the location of a sound-source during a four-day experiment aimed at empirically measuring detection and localization performance.
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