Oil and gas prospection is one of the leading causes of marine noise pollution. For this reason, most countries have guidelines to be used during seismic surveys to ensure no sensitive species are near the equipment and to prevent any possible physical effects caused by the sources.
One of these guidelines is the pre-watch before the seismic sources (air guns) start. In Brazil, the “acoustic pre-watch” (Passive acoustic monitoring for 24 hours) is recorded and delivered to IBAMA (Brazil’s governmental agency) for data auditing. Brazilian waters contain several dolphin species that are found at risk due to seismic sources.

The problem

The acoustic data size delivered to IBAMA is too large to be audited manually. Therefore, solely a few of the seismic projects are audited currently.

The Solution

Together with Biosonar and IBAMA, Deep Voice has developed an automatic detection tool to search for dolphins’ acoustic signals in the acoustic pre-watch. 

Impact

Using the automatization, IBAMA will be able to audit 100% of the acoustic pre-watch data and use it to regulate the noise pollution affecting the dolphins’ welfare.  After IBAMA utilization of the atomization tool, Deep Voice aims to contact and assist other environmental agencies of the world that deal with similar problems and share with them the automatic detection tool to use