This paper contributes to documenting a change in the distribution of North Atlantic right whales Eubalaena glacialis (NARWs) that occurred in the 2010s, when the whales largely abandoned their traditional summering grounds in the Gulf of Maine/Bay of Fundy/Scotian shelf. Data from a year-round passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) network in the Gulf of St. Lawrence were exploited to build the time series of NARW incursions into this inland sea of the Northwest Atlantic, from June 2010 to November 2018. NARWs visited the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence every year from June to January, until ice freeze-up. The earliest detections were made at the end of April and the latest in mid-January. Call occurrence peaked between August and the end of October. NARW contact calls were not detected at the most upstream station at Les Escoumins, in the Lower St. Lawrence estuary, or at the northeastern connection of Belle Isle Strait with the Atlantic, which was monitored from November 2010 to November 2011. The mean daily occurrence of NARWs in the feeding grounds off Gaspé quadrupled after 2015 compared to 2011−2014. Long-term continuous PAM data provided invaluable information to document this marine mammal distribution shift.
Atlantic bluefin tuna Thunnus thynnus (ABFT) is a fish of high market value which has recently become strongly overexploited, notably in the Mediterranean Sea. This area is an essential habitat for ABFT reproduction and growth. We present here an approach for deriving the daily mapping of potential ABFT feeding and spawning habitats based on satellite-derived sea surface temperature (SST) and chl a concentration. The feeding habitat was mainly derived from the simultaneous occurrence of oceanic fronts of temperature and chl a content while the spawning habitat was mostly inferred from the heating of surface waters. Generally, higher chl a contents were found to be preferred for the feeding habitat and a minimum SST value was found for the spawning habitat. Both habitats were defined by the presence of relevant oceanographic features and are therefore potential and functionally-linked habitats. This approach provides, for the first time, a synoptic view of the potential ABFT habitats in the Mediterranean Sea. The model performs well in areas where both satellite data and ABFT observations are available, as 80% of presence data are in the vicinity of potential habitats. The computed monthly, seasonal and annual maps of potential feeding and spawning habitat of ABFT from 2003 to 2009 are in good agreement with current knowledge on ABFT. Overall, the habitat size of ABFT is about 6% of the Mediterranean Sea surface. The results displayed a strong seasonality in habitat size and locations as well as high year-to-year variations (30 to 60%), particularly for the potential spawning habitat, which is key information for evaluating the utility of ABFT Marine Protected Areas in the Mediterranean Sea.
Acoustic waves traveling in a shallow-water waveguide produce a set of multiple paths that can be characterized as a geometric approximation by their travel time (TT), direction of arrival (DOA), and direction of departure (DOD). This study introduces the use of the DOA and DOD as additional observables that can be combined to the classical TT to track sound-speed perturbations in an oceanic waveguide. To model the TT, DOA, and DOD variations induced by sound-speed perturbations, the three following steps are used: (1) In the first-order Born approximation, the Fréchet kernel provides a linear link between the signal fluctuations and the sound-speed perturbations; (2) a double-beamforming algorithm is used to transform the signal fluctuations received on two source-receiver arrays in the time, receiver-depth, and source-depth domain into the eigenray equivalent measured in the time, reception-angle and launch angle domain; and finally (3) the TT, DOA, and DOD variations are extracted from the double-beamformed signal variations through a first-order Taylor development. As a result, time-angle sensitivity kernels are defined and used to build a linear relationship between the observable variations and the sound-speed perturbations. This approach is validated with parabolic-equation simulations in a shallow-water ocean context.
In this paper, a high resolution array processing is presented in the context of ocean acoustic tomography for separating raypaths in the DOA-temporal domain. It is a com bination of the active large band MUSIC (MUSICAL) with spatio-frequency smoothing processing method. The processing is applied on synthetic data. Compared with the conventional beamforming, this algorithm largely improves the separation performances and presents less artifacts.
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