PAM-Trends

Long-Term Trends and Environmental Variables

This project is a part of NOAA Fisheries PAM SI coordination

Goal and Target Outcome

Integration of PAM and environmental data to develop new tools that can be applied to all regions and species of interest for ecological applications and investigating trends across large spatial and temporal scales.

Summary

We will create a streamlined workflow to integrate PAM data with necessary ancillary datasets to address questions relevant to environmental variables and long-term species trends. This workflow will include: identifying PAM data to be included; identifying the environmental data to be included; creating tools for accessing, formatting, and integrating a subset of these data streams; and using these tools and approaches broadly across all regions and species of interest.

The first goal of this project is to compare humpback whale occurrence trends along the US East Coast.

The second goal will be to identify and create tools to access and apply relevant environmental data to the humpback whale dataset.

The third goal will be to integrate data nationwide. All regions will submit and format their humpback detection data into the Passive Acoustic Cetacean Map (PACM)/Makara database.

This workflow will allow for a national comparison of one species to be able to identify and compare changes (or lack thereof) within and across regions. Once this structure has been established, these standardized data formats, tools, and environmental data streams can be applied across the range of project goals and regional needs, including regional-specific high-profile species. This project directly supports the PAM SI objective to advance PAM data analysis and integration approaches with an emphasis on addressing long-term trends.

Action Items

Data Identification and Access: Species and Environmental Variables