Clark, Christopher W

IP Johnson Dir of Bioacoust Re
As the I.P. Johnson Director of the Bioacoustics Research Program (BRP) I oversee and direct a vigorous, multi-disciplinary program that is actively engaged in both basic and applied research. In some ways it is difficult to clearly distinguish between my specific activities and those of BRP`s professional staff. As in last year`s report, here I have included only those activities that I specifically have been directly responsible for. Thus, for example, this report does not include training, workshops, manuals or public outreach that BRP`s staff have accomplished in the past year. It does not include the manuals and technical information documents that the BRP posts on our website. How those accomplishments get credited to CALS seems a legitimate question.

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Bioacoustic bird monitoring continues to expand and improve through a wide variety of collaborations. Projects include migratory bird monitoring on DOD installations, noise effects on endangered bird species, rare bird monitoring, miniaturized radio tracking transmitters and advanced radio tracking receiver networks, research and development of passive acoustic technologies for detecting, identifying and tracking migrating birds over continental US.|Scientific conservation research on a variety of large whale species continues throughout the world`s oceans. The National Ocean Partnership Program collaborative effort with the NOAA Sanctuary Program is underway off the east coast. PhD student Renata Sousa-Lima successfully defended. PhD student Danielle Cholewiak will be done in spring 2008, while Mya Thompson (forest elephants) and Ingrid Biedron (North Atlantic right whales) are making significant progress. The research analyst team lead by Melissa Fowler has expanded to 10, and they have made great strides to keep up with the heavy demands of data processing. Peter Wrege is doinf a fantastic job leading the Elephand Listening Project and had two successful expeditions to Gabon, Africa.

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BRP is working to successfully enable and implement the CLO`s new Strategic Plan, in particular the challenges of going global and making our varied products available to the world at large. The hardware production facility has doubled again in the last year. BRP scientists continue to conduct scientific and applied research projects around the globe on a diversity of species. These efforts are directed toward understanding what-where-when-and-why species are present in an area, often with an underlying motivation to determine the impacts of human activities on individuals and populations over large spatial and temporal scales. Such ambitious undertakings are enabled by a growing suite of customized data collection and analysis systems designed and fabricated by our teams of hardware and software engineers, and tested by our team of research analysts. The active recognition of passive acoustic monitoring as a critical tool for habitat assessment, management, mitigation and monitoring by federal agencies, state agencies, NGOs and industry, is evidence of the opportunities and challenges for BRP and the CLO. There were improvements in radio frequency transceiver and auto-tracking tags, and we conducted multiple radio-frequency (RF) pilot projects over the summer. Demands by federal and state agencies, NGOs and industries for advanced technologies to monitor and interpret the activities of individuals and populations continued to increase.
Keywords: bioacoustical oceanography workshops, bioacoustic analysis techniques workshops, distribution and population assessment, marine mammal behavior, monitoring and mitigation of acoustic impacts, particularly in remote habitats., particularly noise, particularly wind energy development, scientific conservation