Acoustic Recording System : a portable hardware system for shipboard passive acoustic monitoring of cetaceans using a towed hydrophone array

"Technological advances in both software and hardware have lead to dramatic improvements in systems used for passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) of cetaceans from a variety of platforms. While these advances have vastly improved the quality and quantity of data, the rapid evolution of hardware and software have made it difficult to allow for standardization and collaboration between researchers. Recently, government scientists responsible for PAM of cetaceans have been coordinating efforts in an attempt to standardize methods, including hardware and software, to allow for collaboration and comparison of results. In addition, standardization of methods will allow the various organizations to make the most of limited resources. One component of this standardization was to create a portable acoustic recording system that would be the primary hardware package for standard shipboard surveys using towed hydrophone systems and would allow recordings from the full range of cetacean sounds (up to 160 kHz)." Shannon Rankin, Jay Barlow. System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader.