June 2025

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June 2025 | Oceanography

41

INTRODUCTION

Events such as fish stock collapse, coastal flooding during severe

storms, and major oil and other toxic spills, along with the

need for the conservation of protected and endangered species

including many marine mammals, are making ocean users and

the broader public increasingly aware of the need for responsible

marine stewardship. Interest in responsible planning and man­

agement of ocean resources has sparked international research

programs that are measuring baseline conditions that can be

used to assess current effects and future variations, trends, and

impacts. Through the National Oceanographic Partnership

Program (NOPP), the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

(BOEM), Office of Naval Research (ONR), and National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) contracted

a team led by the University of New Hampshire to develop and

deploy the Atlantic Deepwater Ecosystem Observatory Network

(ADEON), whose objective was to improve the understand­

ing of marine soundscapes and their relation to the ecosystem

of the US Atlantic deep waters. Marine ecosystem monitoring

supports the mandates of multiple federal agencies that seek to

understand and mitigate human impacts on the offshore envi­

ronment. Long-term observations of living marine resources

and marine sound inform compliance with the US Endangered

Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the

Sustainable Fisheries Act, while physicochemical measurements

of water and air quality help inform agency compliance with the

Clean Water and Clean Air Acts.

Although there has been extensive hydrographic research

along the South Atlantic OCS (e.g., Lee et al., 1991; Atkinson

et al., 1983; Lee and Atkinson, 1983), knowledge of the ocean

soundscape and its relationship to regional OCS dynamics is rel­

atively unexplored. Ocean sound is now an accepted Essential

Ocean Variable in the Global Ocean Observing System (Tyack

et al., 2023) due to its wide utility as an indicator of physical and

biological ocean processes. Sound travels efficiently underwater,

making it the dominant modality that marine life and humans

alike use to sense and respond to the changing environment;

information provided by underwater acoustic methodologies

has become critical to applications spanning national secu­

rity, adaptive management of marine resources, monitoring of

climate change, tsunami warning, and search and rescue (Howe

et al., 2019). Thus, understanding the unique and complex rela­

tionship between ocean sound and the environment at regional

scales is vital to assessing any projected impact of immediate or

forecasted change related to climate or human use.

A full contextual description of the relationship between

marine organisms and their environments, including acous­

tics, is lacking (Hawkins and Popper, 2017). The effects of expo­

sure of marine organisms to intense sounds is becoming bet­

ter understood; however, the long-term cumulative effects from

noise-generating sources, including seismic surveys, offshore

wind energy, military and shipping vessels, and recreational

boating, is not well understood. Hence, there is a critical need

to work toward comprehensive knowledge of the interactions

between marine life and the ocean soundscape, defined as the

auditory scene in a region resulting from biologic (marine life),

geologic (non-biological natural sound such as wind, precipi­

tation, and ice), and anthropogenic (human activity) contribu­

tions to the soundscape, characterized by the ambient sound

in terms of its spatial, temporal, and frequency attributes, and

the types of sound sources (ISO 18405, 2017). ADEON was

designed to synoptically record ocean sound and ecosystem

indicators of biomass, conductivity, temperature, and dissolved

oxygen (CT-DO). Measurements from stationary, mobile, and

space-based platforms (Figure 1a) were combined to provide

context for understanding and modeling how environmental

variability manifests in the regional soundscape.

ADEON was structured into four major technical

phases: (1) Network Design, Equipment Procurement, and

Deployment; (2) Data Acquisition and Network Maintenance;

(3) Data Processing, and (4) Data Integration and Visualization.

During the proposal development stage, the ADEON team

recognized a lack of community-wide standardization for

ocean soundscape data and data products. Thus, standardiza­

tion was an overarching effort elevated above the four techni­

cal phases that generated products for soundscape terminol­

ogy, data acquisition, processing, and reporting. In fulfillment

of the NOPP requirement to make all data and products pub­

licly available, all raw data are publicly available through the

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information

ABSTRACT. The Atlantic Deepwater Ecosystem Observatory Network (ADEON) along the US Mid- and South Atlantic Outer

Continental Shelf (OCS) collected multiple years of measurements that describe the ecology and soundscape of the OCS. Ocean pro­

cesses, marine life dynamics, and human use of the ocean are each three dimensional and time dependent, and occur at many spatial

and temporal scales. Because no single measurement system (in situ or remote) is sufficient for describing dynamic ocean variables,

the approach taken by ADEON was to integrate ocean measurements and models. Acoustic information was combined with contex­

tual data from space-based remote sensing, hydrographic sensors, and mobile platforms in order to fully comprehend how human,

biologic, and natural abiotic components create the OCS soundscape and influence its ecosystem dynamics. Standardized methodol­

ogies were developed for comparing soundscapes across regions and for generating predictive models of the soundscape and overall

ecology of the OCS at 200–900 m water depths. These data provide a baseline for pattern and trend analyses of ambient sound and

the ecosystem components of the OCS soundscapes. They contribute to understanding of regional processes over multi-year time­

scales and support ecosystem-based management of marine resources in an acoustically under-sampled ocean region.

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