Navigating the bioacoustic landscape: Standardization and interoperability of acoustic data products

The importance of bioacoustics for understanding and protecting the natural world has grown significantly over the last few decades. Our capacity to monitor the acoustical landscape has increased with lower cost instrumentation, improved communication, infrastructure, and storage, as well as the development of reliable machine learning methods for analysis. Understanding long-term trends in animal populations as well as the impacts of anthropogenic noise requires the ability to retain and interpret records over decadal time scales, record in detail what type of analysis has been performed and understand when multiple analyses may be combined and when they should not be. This is not possible without a well-defined set of terms and meanings. In this talk, we will provide an overview of the work of Acoustical Society of America’s working group S3-SC1-WG7 that has been charged with developing an American National Standards Institute standard for bioacoustics information derived from acoustic recordings. The proposed standard details what information should be recorded for bioacoustics recording and analysis effort, ranging from specification of data to be noted about instrumentation to information gleaned from recordings such as noise levels, animal calls, and acoustic source locations.