Page 33 - Winter 2008

Standards News
ANIMAL BIOACOUSTICS SUBCOMMITTEE DEBUTS
David K. Delaney
U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory Champaign, Illinois 61822
and
Susan B. Blaeser
Acoustical Society of America Standards Secretariat Melville, New York 11747
At the end of October, Accredited Standards Committee S3, Bioacoustics, approved the first- ever formation of a new subcommittee in the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) Standards Program. The new group is designated S3/SC 1 Animal Bioacoustics and its scope of work is:
Standards, specifications, methods of
measurement and test, instrumenta-
tion and terminology in the field of
psychological and physiological
acoustics, including aspects of gener-
al acoustics, which pertain to biolog-
ical safety, tolerance and comfort of
non-human animals, including both
risk to individual animals and to the
long-term viability of populations.
Animals to be covered may poten-
tially include commercially-grown
food animals; animals harvested for
food in the wild; pets; laboratory ani-
mals; exotic species in zoos, oceanaria or aquariums; or free-ranging wild animals.
As described in the ANSI-Accredited Operating Procedures under which ASA’s four standards committees operate, a Subcommittee has most of the responsibilities and rights of its parent committee. Unlike a Working Group, the Subcommittee is a “consensus body.” It can vote to approve a standard that subsequently can be approved as an American National Standard by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). As a consensus body, a Subcommittee is subject to the same requirements as its parent committee, including openness, balance, transparency, due process, and right to appeal. Like any of ASA’s Accredited Standards Committees, the Subcommittee must maintain its own mem- bership roster balanced by interest category and not domi- nated by any single interest. The Subcommittee is empow- ered to create and disband working groups that draft docu- ments and provide other advisory services within the scope of work assigned to them by the Subcommittee.
The main benefit of forming this Subcommittee is that its voting members, who are responsible for any standards ulti- mately produced by the Subcommittee, will have a direct and material interest in Animal Bioacoustics rather than the more
“One of the goals of the Subcommittee on Animal Bioacoustics is to develop standards that improve the quality, uniformity, and applicability of research so that resource managers and regulatory agencies can manage long-term sustainability of animal populations better.”
general, human-focused, subject matter of the parent committee, S3 Bioacoustics. This should result in a high-quality review of draft documents and ultimately in the production of standards that are useful to the scientific community and the world- at-large.
During the past several years, inter- est in standardization has begun to grow in the animal bioacoustics technical area. Standards Working Groups began to be formed in both S3 and S1 and although drafts have not reached the final ballot stage, work is progressing. As part of the ballot to form the Subcommittee, S3 voted to move the three existing working groups into the new Subcommittee, renumbering them and in one case assigning a new title and scope. S3/SC 1 have started operations with the following working groups:
• S3/SC 1/WG 1 Animal Bioacoustics Terminology
• S3/SC 1/WG 2 Effects of Sound on Fish and Turtles
• S3/SC 1/WG 3 Underwater Passive Acoustic
Monitoring for Bioacoustic Applications.
There has been increased interest in Animal Bioacoustics over the last few years, especially in the areas of animal communication and detection, hearing sensitivi- ty, and noise disturbance research. Experts in Animal Bioacoustics are drawn from many different technical areas such as biology, ecology, physics, environmental science, ocean engineering, and others. They often come to acoustics indirectly and may not share a common vocabu- lary with the acoustics community or even with each other. It is important that standards be developed for conducting field and laboratory work in Animal Bioacoustics so that data are uniform and research can be replicated. There are a number of aspects within the field of Animal Bioacoustics that could benefit from the establishment of standards, such as terminology, reporting of field protocols, field/laboratory equipment, sound metrics and frequency weighting curves, calibration, etc. One of the goals of the Subcommittee on Animal Bioacoustics is to develop standards that improve
Standards News 31