EAGER: BobberOne: An integrated acoustic sensing float for cross-trophic biology

About This Grant

"BobberOne" is a low-cost, portable float that will use acoustic sensing to detect regionally important zooplankton, fish, and marine mammals in near real-time. Physical processes such as currents and turbulence transport phytoplankton and small zooplankton, influencing the distributions of larger zooplankton, fish, and higher-level predators. Predation pressure, in turn, drives prey avoidance behaviors that collectively create large area movement patterns at regional and global scales. Acoustic sensing technologies are widely used to study marine ecosystems worldwide. Current tools for making these measurements can be expensive and complex, result in limited data coverage. Large-scale deployment of many BobberOne floats would provide high resolution data and coverage needed for biological observation in coastal waters. The project team will mentor a graduate student on this project and host a marine technology “open house” at APL for students in the Ocean Research College Academy (ORCA) early college program at Everett Community College. The PIs propose to develop “BobberOne,” a low-cost, portable float integrating active and passive acoustic sensing with edge processing and cloud connectivity for near real-time, cross-trophic biological observation in coastal waters. As part of the Internet of Things, BobberOne will collect acoustic data, detect regionally important zooplankton, fish, and marine mammals, and transmit results to the cloud. The proposed project will develop BobberOne, an agile, resource-efficient instrument capable of acoustic-based cross-trophic biological observation. The BobberOne float will use a machine learning algorithm to detect hearing-sensitive marine mammals, and only if no mammals are detected the active acoustic transmissions will be turned on, "adaptively" muting active transmissions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.