Ushering in a new era in fisheries and plankton acoustics

Le résumé fourni par la source

The ICES-sponsored fisheries and plankton acoustic symposia are meant to bring together those from around the world who use active acoustics to improve our understanding of marine and freshwater environments. These symposia have brought the community together since 1973, and their proceedings have been “bookmarks” for the progress and innovation of fisheries and plankton acoustics (Table 1). Previous fisheries and plankton acoustics’ symposium proceedings. Previous fisheries and plankton acoustics’ symposium proceedings. From Echosounders to the Cloud: Transforming Acoustic Data to Information was no different. This was the eighth in the series of fisheries acoustics symposia, and 2023 was the 50th anniversary of these symposia. We brought 150 scientists and engineers, 34 of whom were early career scientists (ECSs), from 26 countries representing all inhabited continents together in Portland, Maine, USA, during 27–30 March 2023. Of the 150 participants, 105 were males and 45 were females, importantly, the ECSs had a nearly 50%–50% ratio with 18 males and 16 females, which is a trend we hope will continue. The goal of the symposium was to facilitate exchange among the spectrum of scientists and engineers who develop acoustic instrumentation, collect data, and transform electronic data to information critical for observing the status of and conserving fisheries and ecosystems. Many institutions monitor multiple facets of the ecosystem and have accumulated decades-long datasets and terabytes of data and information. The fisheries and plankton acoustics community continues to develop and evaluate new acoustic instrumentation and to package them with other sensors on crewed and remote/autonomous platforms to observe components of the ecosystem that until now have been too expensive or impossible to monitor. In response to this rapid increase in data, the community has evolved to integrate multiple data processing streams to address ecosystem science using “big data” analytics such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide information used by resource managers and policymakers. This information can be used for improved decision-making for ecosystem management. The abstracts from this symposium are provided as Supplemental Material and reflect the spectrum of science and technology that is the foundation of observing ecosystems acoustically and the continued evolution of analyzing those data. We chose the title of the symposium because our perception is that there is a transition in the fisheries and plankton acoustics community. In the 1970s and 1980s, commercial and academic efforts developed robust echosounders that could be calibrated to an absolute standard and provide reliable data over time scales of weeks to years. The community was dominated by acousticians, engineers, and those fisheries scientists brave enough to break away from the traditional sampling methods to use this “new” tool. The ICES working group on Fisheries Acoustics, Science and Technology (WGFAST) was addressing freshwater and marine ecosystem questions using analog echosounders, and while successful at observing these ecosystems at very different scales than using nets or other observational gear, the emphasis was on the acoustic methodology. We were trying to interpret and quantify what we were seeing on the echograms and what those bytes meant in the “real” world. Assessments of commercial fish stocks were the first challenges in the use of active acoustics, giving rise to numerous exchanges with the ICES working group Fishing Technology and Fish Behaviour (WGFTFB) in order to better understand the impact of fish behavior on the uncertainties in assessments. Developments in technology and the use of several acoustic frequencies have revealed that what we see on echograms is not a single view, but “seascapes” depending on the frequencies used. Research is continuing on the acoustic properties of zooplankton, micronekton, and fish, giving an essential place to the acoustic approach, not only in stock assessments, but also in the ecosystem approach to the study of environments. Recently, our perception is that the community is changing to one that is focused on science and data rather than engineering and the field is evolving towards utilizing echosounders as data collection tools rather than a focus on the tools themselves. Science and management have always been at the root of what our community does, so has there been a complete switch or is the change more nuanced? It may not be that our overall goals and challenges have changed, but how the community approaches those goals and challenges seems to have evolved. One example of this is the increase in the number of papers presented over the years at the fisheries acoustics’ symposia that used artificial intelligence methods to analyze data. We searched titles and abstracts from each symposium’s proceedings using the terms: artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural network, and deep learning. We found that the Aberdeen symposium in 1996 was the first to include neural networks with three papers, then one paper at the Montpellier symposium in 2003, and one paper at the Bergen symposium in 2009. In contrast, this symposium had 16 presentations and posters that used artificial intelligence methods and one dedicated session to advanced analytical techniques. In addition, the scientific disciplines that acoustics can support with information have expanded through technological developments, from biology and management through biogeochemistry to physical oceanography. The sheer size (terabytes) and length (decades) of available datasets is impressive and represents another evolution of this field. The missions of collecting and analyzing acoustic data have grown from local or regional single-species stock assessments to global estimates of biomass, such as those proposed by Xabier Irigoien and co-authors for mesopelagic fish (Irigoien et al. 2014), and effects of climate change on the global pelagic community as measured and predicted by Alejandro Ariza and co-authors (Ariza et al. 2022). Data management has been a fundamental topic since we started recording and digitizing echosounder signals, so the importance has not waned, but how we manage our data has advanced. As we become globally connected, institutions and agencies are making their data FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse; https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles). The fisheries and plankton acoustics community is in concert to address the challenges of FAIR data. Data no longer reside solely on a hard drive connected to a personal computer or on an intra-institutional network; they are findable and accessible on the internet (e.g. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/maps/water-column-sonar). Adoption of open metadata conventions (e.g. ICES 2016) and data formats (e.g. Macaulay and Peña 2018) is allowing interoperability and uses beyond fisheries stock assessment. Advances in analytical methods are evolving from standard statistical tests to artificial intelligence and machine learning “big data” analytics. These advances have the potential to expand the reusability of data that were originally collected for single-species stock assessment to ecosystems, trophic food webs, and biological communities. Data are different from information. When a resource manager or ecosystem modeler needs to know how many prey are available for a fisher or apex predator, they do not need raw data, they need information based on the data that we collect. We, as a community, are best suited to transform those data into the information needed for resource management and conservation. Our three keynote speakers provided expertise in areas where information derived from acoustic data can be useful. They presented overarching perspectives on offshore wind development (Andrew Lipsky, the lead for NOAA NEFSC’s offshore wind development), ecosystem management (M

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