| Summary: | Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-166). In recent years, passive acoustic survey methods have become increasingly important in marine mammal population and ecosystem studies. Passive acoustic monitoring has been progressively combined with traditional visual survey techniques during line transect surveys for marine mammals. The objectives of this research were to test available automated detection methods for passive acoustic monitoring and integrate the best available method into standard marine mammal monitoring protocols for ship based surveys. Specifically, there were three overarching goals: 1) develop, test, and compare algorithms for automated classification of beaked whale signals; 2) employ and test techniques for beaked whale detection at sea; and, 3) use information from automated beaked whale detections to create the first acoustic based habitat models for beaked whale species and compare these with visual-based models for the same region. The goal of the first chapter was to evaluate the performance and utility of PAMGUARD 1.0 Core software for use in automated detection of marine mammal acoustic signals during towed array surveys. Three different detector configurations of PAMGUARD were compared. These automated detection algorithms were evaluated by comparing them to the results of manual detections made by an experienced bio-acoustician (author TMY). This study provides the first detailed comparisons of PAMGUARD automated detection algorithms to manual detection methods. The results of these comparisons clearly illustrate the utility of automated detection methods for odontocete species. Results of this work showed that the majority of whistles and click events can be reliably detected using PAMGUARD software. The second chapter moves beyond automated detection to examine and test automated classification algorithms for beaked whale species. Beaked whales are notoriously elusive and difficult to study, especially using visual survey methods. However, due to recent advances in passive ...
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