STUDY TITLE: Acoustic Metadata Management and Transparent Access to Networked 

Oceanographic Data Sets

REPORT TITLE: Acoustic Metadata Management and Transparent Access to Networked 

Oceanographic Data Sets

CONTRACT NUMBER: M11PG00012

SPONSORING REGION: National

APPLICABLE PLANNING AREA: International

FISCAL YEARS OF PROJECT FUNDING: 2011-2015

COMPLETION DATE OF REPORT: August 16, 2015

COSTS: FY 2011: 26,409, FY 2012: 23,378, FY 2013: 133,900, FY 2014: 66,313

CUMULATIVE PROJECT COST: 250,000

PROJECT MANAGERS: M. A. Roch

AFFILIATION: San Diego State University

ADDRESS: 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA, 92182-720

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS*

: M. A. Roch, S. Baumann-Pickering, C. L. Berchok, J. A. 

Hildebrand, E. M. Oleson, S. M. Van Parijs

KEY WORDS: cetacean, passive acoustic monitoring, database, environmental data, 

bioacoustics

BACKGROUND: The use of passive acoustic monitoring to detect, classify, localize, and 

establish density estimates of marine fauna offers the ability to provide monitoring and 

mitigation for marine mammals and other vocalizing species. The volume of acoustic data has 

grown exponentially in nearly every organization that conducts passive acoustic monitoring on a 

regular basis. A growing problem is how to manage metadata derived from the acoustic 

recordings. Consistency is required to analyze across projects for greater spatial and temporal 

coverage, however flexibility is also needed so that new parameters can be added as science 

advances. This project develops methods to organize acoustic metadata in order to permit 

analysis over multiple projects with different spatiotemporal coverages.

OBJECTIVES: (1) Develop a set of data structuring rules appropriate for describing sounds 

originating from marine mammals, fish, natural phenomena, and anthropogenic sound sources. 

(2) Implement software to realize these data structuring rules. (3) Provide methods to access 

environmental data products in a consistent and simple manner.

SIGNIFICANT CONCLUSIONS: A set of extended markup language schemata called Tethys 

have been developed to annotate sounds originating from marine mammals, fish, humans, or 

natural phenomena. Rules for annotating types of sounds have been well tested. Rules for 

localization will likely require further development as there have not been enough localization 
data produced to ensure that all cases have been handled. A collection of open source programs 

called The Tethys Metadata Workbench has been developed to implement databases using the 

schemata and is freely available. The Tethys Metadata Workbench also implements a protocol 

to access many types of environmental data in a consistent manner.

STUDY RESULTS: Programs and data rules are freely available at: http://tethys.sdsu.edu. 

Annotations from over 300 years of acoustic analysis effort has been stored in servers and 

methods have been established to submit summaries to the Ocean Biogeographic Observing 

System – Spatial Ecological Analysis of Megavertebrate Populations (OBIS-SEAMAP; Halpin

et al., 2009). This project has been a critical infrastructure component in US Navy range reports 

and several recently published articles (Baumann-Pickering et al., 2014; Roch et al., 2015; 

Širović et al., 2015), both using Tethys’s ability to organize acoustic metadata and its capacity 

to help automate the access of environmental data.

STUDY PRODUCT: The Tethys Metadata Schema, The Tethys Metadata Workbench, both 

available at http://tethys.sdsu.edu. In addition, four refereed journal publications were either 

published (Baumann-Pickering et al., 2014; Roch et al., 2015; Širović et al., 2015) or submitted 

(Roch et al., submitted) and one refereed conference publication was published (Roch et al., 

2013).

REFERENCES:

Baumann-Pickering, S., Roch, M. A., Brownell Jr, R. L., Simonis, A. E., McDonald, M. A., 

Solsona-Berga, A., Oleson, E. M., Wiggins, S. M., and Hildebrand, J. A. (2014). "SpatioTemporal Patterns of Beaked Whale Echolocation Signals in the North Pacific," Plos One 

9(1), pp. 17, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0086072.g001.

Halpin, P. N., Read, A. J., Fujioka, E., Best, B. D., Donnelly, B., Hazen, L. J., Kot, C., Urian, K., 

LaBrecque, E., Dimatteo, A., Cleary, J., Good, C., Crowder, L. B., and Hyrenbach, K. D. 

(2009). "OBIS-SEAMAP The World Data Center for Marine Mammal, Sea Bird, and Sea 

Turtle Distributions," Oceanography 22(2), 104-115.

Roch, M. A., Batchelor, H., Baumann-Pickering, S., Berchock, C. L., Cholewiak, D., Fujioka, E., 

Garland , E. C., Herbert, S., Hildebrand, J. A., Munger, L. M., Oleson, E. M., Van Parijs, 

S. M., Risch, D., and Širović , A. (submitted). "Management of Acoustic Metadata for 

Bioacoustics."

Roch, M. A., Baumann-Pickering, S., Batchelor, H., Hwang, D., Sirovic, A., Hildebrand, J. A., 

Berchok, C. L., Cholewiak, D., Munger, L. M., Oleson, E. M., Van Parijs, S., Risch, D., 

and Soldevilla, M. S. (2013). "Tethys: a workbench and database for passive acoustic 

metadata," Oceans 2013, 5 pp.

Roch, M. A., Stinner-Sloan, J., Baumann-Pickering, S., and Wiggins, S. M. (2015). 

"Compensating for the effects of site and equipment variation on delphinid species 

identification from their echolocation clicks," J. Acous. Soc. Am. 137(1), 22.

Širović , A., Rice, A., Chou, E., Hildebrand, J. A., and Roch, M. A. (2015). "Seven years of blue 

and fin whale call abundance in Southern California," Endang. Species Res. 28, 61-75.

* P.I.’s affiliation may be different than that listed for Project Managers