Active Acoustics Strategic Initiative

Revolutionizing and expanding opportunities for active acoustic data in ecosystem-based fisheries science and management through a NOAA-wide program that advances analytical methods for multi-disciplinary data collected from innovative platforms

About

The Active Acoustics Strategic Initiative (AA-SI) is a NOAA-Fisheries Essential Data Acquisition (EDA) project funded by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It is a three-year project, with funding until the end of fiscal year 2026.

Active acoustics here refers to multi-frequency and wide-bandwidth echosounders that span frequency spectra from kHz to mHz and data-processing and analytical software used to assess fish and zooplankton populations for fisheries research and management. Echosounders transmit pulses of sound into the ocean and record frequency-dependent echoes from marine organisms that are used to classify the echoes to taxa or species, map their distributions, and estimate abundances. Classification is done by manual or automated segmentation and attribution and may include ancillary information to enhance accuracy. Development of classification approaches is often stifled by large data volumes, continual improvements in processing wide-bandwidth and low-frequency acoustic data, and uncertainty in relationships with habitat factors.

NOAA collects active acoustic data from an increasingly diverse number of crewed and uncrewed platforms such as Fisheries Survey Vessels, autonomous surface and underwater vehicles, moorings, and landers. Compared to data from multi-frequency echosounders, wide-bandwidth echosounder data are much more voluminous and provide higher resolution frequency-response information, but also present challenges for data storage and analysis. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and statistical techniques comprise advanced analytical methods that are needed to significantly accelerate automated echo classification through the combination of high-resolution echosounder, biological, and habitat data.

AA SI Meeting Schedule

We are currently meeting on a bi-weekly basis and engaging with OMAO, contractors, and other collaborators regularly