Page 7 - Acoustics Today

FROM THE EDITOR
Dick Stern
1150 Linden Hall Road Boalsburg, Pennsylvania 16827
We are very pleased to present this issue of Acoustics Today on remote sensing of animals using acoustics. We are deeply grateful to our Guest Editor, Jen Miksis-Olds and her authors. As she said to me when she submitted the excellent papers for editing, we both learned a lot from reading them. You will as well.
See you in Kansas City. Dick Stern
FROM THE GUEST EDITOR
Jen Miksis-Olds
autonomous passive acoustic monitoring during times when traditional acoustic surveys were not feasible.
The original use of sonar was a mili- tary application used to navigate and locate targets larger than an automobile. The tar- get would appear as a “blip” on a screen to announce its presence, and the sonar tech- nician had to use all ancillary information available to determine whether the target was friend or foe. Who would have imag- ined that that every recreational boater would outfit their vessel with an echosounder to aid in navigation and fish- finding, and that scientists would be using combinations of transducers to sense and classify microscopic organisms or provide
acoustic target images with the resolution of a video camera? Advances in technology have changed the manner in which bioacoustic research is now conducted. Passive acoustic sensor packages can be smaller than your hand and
It is an exciting time to be involved in
the field of animal bioacoustics. It wasn’t
that long ago that early passive acoustic
recordings were made with a single sensor
deployed on land, from boats, or through
holes drilled in the ice. These recording
systems had to be constantly monitored
due to the limited storage medium and
capacity of tape recorders, lack of
ruggedized equipment to withstand harsh
climates and weather, and the need to
make hand-written notes of the animals
observed in the area during the record-
ings. This meant that a person loaded up
with a bulky recording system had to sit
vigilantly for hours watching and listening
from a seat in a boat, on a pier, under a
tree, in a cave, or next to an ice hole, four hours on end. It was the pioneering work of dedicated researchers, often under extreme working conditions, that initially document- ed species-specific vocalizations and laid the foundation for
6 Acoustics Today, July 2012