Workshop: Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) of marine mammals (28 October 2017)

We like to announce a workshop titled: “Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) of marine mammals” at the upcoming 22nd Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammal Society. This two day workshop will take place on Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th of October.

Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) has now been used in several large projects that have produced results that could not be achieved by other methods within realistic budgets, but it is a young method with multiple challenges. This workshop aims to focus on all issues that impact efforts to use PAM of all marine mammals and present recently finished and ongoing projects. Both, static acoustic monitoring as well as towed systems will be presented and three taxa, namely toothed whales, baleen whales and pinnipeds are covered.

In a novel format, we will combine tutorials on equipment, detectors, classifiers and density estimation with invited talks by experts in the field and some contributed presentations.

Topics of the workshop will include:

1. Available instruments, methods of data analysis and comparison thereof
2. Performance of classifiers including false positive rates, noise impacts, and time costs
3. Species identification
4. Detection functions, including cue rates, detectability
5. Density estimates, comparability with other methods
6. Large PAM projects, project design, long-term monitoring and MPAs, logistics, managing, analyzing and presenting large date sets
7. Future developments

Please register via the conference website:
http://www.smmconference.org/WorkshopDescriptions

We have limited space for few contributed presentations and welcome submission of abstracts for short presentations on any of the topics covered in this workshop. Please e-mail Jens Koblitz at Jens.Koblitz@bioacousticsnetwork.org if you are interested in presennting at this workshop.

We are looking forward to seeing you in Halifax,

Marie Roch, Danielle Harris and Jens Koblitz