| Summary: | Progress Code: onGoing Statement: A long-term spectral average (LTSA) was generated for each site-year to provide a synoptic overview of the quality of each deployment. The resolution of the LTSA was 1 hour in duration and 0.73 Hz (12,000/16384). In addition to the LTSA, one hour of audio from each month was inspected to ensure that there were no gross issues with the recordings. The MAR deployed along the Casey resupply for the 2015 calendar year (Casey2015) was destroyed by the ship during retrieval and no data are available for that year. The MAR deployed along the Casey resupply route for the 2016 calendar year (Casey2016) stopped recording on 2016-07-16, which was earlier than forecast based on expected battery life and storage capacity. Purpose This multi-year initiative within the Australian Marine Mammal Centre aims to implement a focused acoustic research program that will examine Southern Ocean marine mammal population dynamics through the use of technologically advanced acoustic monitoring techniques. In order to achieve the aims of this study an international collaboration has been developed leading to a multi-faceted research program. Long-term autonomous sea-floor recording devices will be utilised to conduct year-round acoustic surveys in targeted locations. These data will be used to assess distribution, movement, vocalisation density, seasonality, and behaviour of cetaceans in Southern Ocean waters. These results can then be integrated with concurrently collected data on oceanographic and biological variables from vessel based surveys and remote satellite sensing leading to a larger understanding of the role of marine mammals in the Southern Ocean ecosystem. The Southern Ocean Research Partnership (SORP) is an international research program initiated within the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 2009 to promote collaborative cetacean research, develop novel research techniques, and conduct non-lethal research on whales in the Southern Ocean (SORP, 2009). One of the original research ...
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