Sound science: Harnessing noisy data to evaluate marine ecosystems, human impacts
Cross-institutional effort creates framework to enhance access and usability of marine passive acoustic data
Spotlight
Hiding beneath the ocean’s surface is a vast sea of “noisy” data — a collection of sounds made by marine animals, the physical environment, and human activity. Researchers tap into this chorus of sounds using a network of underwater microphones distributed throughout the ocean. This technique, called passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), allows researchers to better understand animal behavior and how human activity impacts marine ecosystems.
But PAM generates an immense amount of data, making it difficult for users to manage, process, organize, and share the information they collect. Carrie Wall, a CIRES research scientist in NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), and her collaborators were eager to change that.
“Our ability to collect data using acoustic recorders is no longer the bottleneck,” Wall said. “We formed SoundCoop to address these challenges by developing innovative, community-oriented tools and processes that make it easier and more efficient to extract information from large datasets and compare across monitoring programs.”
There are three main sources of sound in the ocean: physical (green), biological (blue), and human-made (orange).
The SoundCoop project team developed a framework to improve and standardize how users process, access, and share marine PAM data across diverse data collection communities, including science and industry. The work, published in Big Earth Data in December 2025, documented and shared:
- Community production of standardized underwater sound levels using open-source and freeware processing software to support regional to international comparisons
- Establishment of a standardized file format
- Centralized visualization to compare ocean sound data and integrate with environmental data
- New tools for current and future PAM projects
“The paper provides specific examples for how quantified ocean sounds can help scientists understand how sound changes over time in one location and how ocean sound varies across regions,” Wall said.
Long, continuous records of marine sounds are vital for understanding how noise changes in marine environments following disturbances, like an increase in boat activity or energy exploration, or even changes in migratory patterns of whales and other animals. The SoundCoop framework will make it easier for scientists to share data and collaborate to build these kinds of records.
