Passive Acoustic Monitoring of Noisy Coral Reefs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Vishnu, Hari, Too, Yuen Min, Chitre, Mandar, Huang, Danwei, Koay, Teong Beng, Jain, Sudhanshi S.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912693708914688
author Vishnu, Hari
Too, Yuen Min
Chitre, Mandar
Huang, Danwei
Koay, Teong Beng
Jain, Sudhanshi S.
author_facet Vishnu, Hari
Too, Yuen Min
Chitre, Mandar
Huang, Danwei
Koay, Teong Beng
Jain, Sudhanshi S.
contents Passive acoustic monitoring offers the potential to enable long-term, spatially extensive assessments of coral reefs. To explore this approach, we deployed underwater acoustic recorders at ten coral reef sites around Singapore waters over two years. To mitigate the persistent biological noise masking the low-frequency reef soundscape, we trained a convolutional neural network denoiser. Analysis of the acoustic data reveals distinct morning and evening choruses. Though the correlation with environmental variates was obscured in the low-frequency part of the noisy recordings, the denoised data showed correlations of acoustic activity indices such as sound pressure level and acoustic complexity index with diver-based assessments of reef health such as live coral richness and cover, and algal cover. Furthermore, the shrimp snap rate, computed from the high-frequency acoustic band, is robustly correlated with the reef parameters, both temporally and spatially. This study demonstrates that passive acoustics holds valuable information that can help with reef monitoring, provided the data is effectively denoised and interpreted. This methodology can be extended to other marine environments where acoustic monitoring is hindered by persistent noise.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_05349
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Passive Acoustic Monitoring of Noisy Coral Reefs
Vishnu, Hari
Too, Yuen Min
Chitre, Mandar
Huang, Danwei
Koay, Teong Beng
Jain, Sudhanshi S.
Sound
Passive acoustic monitoring offers the potential to enable long-term, spatially extensive assessments of coral reefs. To explore this approach, we deployed underwater acoustic recorders at ten coral reef sites around Singapore waters over two years. To mitigate the persistent biological noise masking the low-frequency reef soundscape, we trained a convolutional neural network denoiser. Analysis of the acoustic data reveals distinct morning and evening choruses. Though the correlation with environmental variates was obscured in the low-frequency part of the noisy recordings, the denoised data showed correlations of acoustic activity indices such as sound pressure level and acoustic complexity index with diver-based assessments of reef health such as live coral richness and cover, and algal cover. Furthermore, the shrimp snap rate, computed from the high-frequency acoustic band, is robustly correlated with the reef parameters, both temporally and spatially. This study demonstrates that passive acoustics holds valuable information that can help with reef monitoring, provided the data is effectively denoised and interpreted. This methodology can be extended to other marine environments where acoustic monitoring is hindered by persistent noise.
title Passive Acoustic Monitoring of Noisy Coral Reefs
topic Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05349