Sound exposure level as a metric for analyzing and managing underwater soundscapes

The auditory frequency weighted daily sound exposure level (SEL) is used in many jurisdictions to assess possible injury to the hearing of marine life. Therefore, using daily SEL to describe soundscapes would provide baseline information about the environment using the same tools used to measure inj...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Main Authors: Martin, S. Bruce, Morris, Corey, Broker, Koen, O'Neill, Caitlin
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 2019
Subjects:
PORPOISE PHOCOENA-PHOCOENA
TEMPORARY THRESHOLD SHIFTS
INDUCED HEARING-LOSS
MARINE MAMMALS
IMPULSE NOISE
AMBIENT NOISE
OCEAN
RESPONSES
RECOVERY
HUMANS
Phocoena phocoena
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/11370/f6fda836-5df4-4876-876f-b605c5e5ae8f
https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/f6fda836-5df4-4876-876f-b605c5e5ae8f
https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5113578
https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/118493853/1.5113578.pdf
Description
Summary:The auditory frequency weighted daily sound exposure level (SEL) is used in many jurisdictions to assess possible injury to the hearing of marine life. Therefore, using daily SEL to describe soundscapes would provide baseline information about the environment using the same tools used to measure injury. Here, the daily SEL from 12 recordings with durations of 18-97days are analyzed to: (1) identify natural soundscapes versus environments affected by human activity, (2) demonstrate how SEL accumulates from different types of sources, (3) show the effects of recorder duty cycling on daily SEL, (4) make recommendations on collecting data for daily SEL analysis, and (5) discuss the use of the daily SEL as an indicator of cumulative effects. The autocorrelation of the one-minute sound exposure is used to help identify soundscapes not affected by human activity. Human sound sources reduce the autocorrelation and add low-frequency energy to the soundscapes. To measure the daily SEL for all marine mammal auditory frequency weighting groups, data should be sampled at 64kHz or higher, for at least 1min out of every 30min. The daily autocorrelation of the one-minute SEL provides a confidence interval for the daily SEL computed with duty-cycled data. (C) 2019 Acoustical Society of America.

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