Development of a Pacific-wide passive acoustic glider program to enhance cetacean survey and assessment capabilities

Traditional vessel-based surveys conducted by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) for cetacean stock assessment are often limited by high costs and insufficient coverage. This is particularly true in the Pacific region, which is the largest area under NMFS jurisdiction and is subject to acute shortages of adequate ship time. To address these limitations, a focused initiative is accelerating the use of Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) on buoyancy-driven underwater gliders by developing a Pacific-wide NMFS PAM glider program. The primary goal is to establish a national strategy to augment critical stock assessment surveys and reduce dependency on ships for regular monitoring. Efforts include building capacity to sustain glider operations; validating vehicle and sensor performance and developing use-case guidelines with in-water testing; comparing glider data streams to concurrent shipboard surveys off the U.S. West Coast and Hawai‘i; and advancing modeling methods to integrate these new data into stock assessments. While the initial effort is focused in the Pacific region, a related Research-to-Operations plan will be adaptable to other regions. The project stands to improve the conservation and management of protected species by providing scalable and persistent monitoring in a changing ocean.