Field Report from OceaNoise2023
I’ve just returned from attending OceanNoise2023 – a tri-annual conference on marine bioacoustics – this one in Vilanova i la Geltrú, just 30 km down the coast from Barcelona, Spain. OceaNoise is one of the bi/triennial conferences that coagulate the growing handful(s) of scientists, researchers, regulators, and policy folks interested in the impacts of human ocean enterprise on marine habitats.
Last year in Berlin it was AquaticNoise2022, this year OceanNoise2023. I’ve been attending both of these conferences for most of the history of OCR, and they have been both informative and enjoyable. Unlike some of the US academic conferences, which can be pretty competitive, these European conferences are set up for conviviality.
I attribute this conviviality to Art Popper and Tony Hawkins, who understood that while there were a lot of folks globally who had something to say about the field, it was going to take something fun to entice them all out to share their work in a common venue. Art, Tony, and their wives would do the reconnaissance to locate some European city that was picturesque, and reasonably priced enough to encourage people in our field to travel. They added to the pot by sponsoring the attendance of up-and-coming students.
The OceaNoise conference was conceived by Michel Andre – a global thinker on marine bioacoustics issues, weaving together a biannual conference of ocean researchers, academics, regulators, military, and industrial stakeholders.
Both conferences feature a “single track” strategy, wherein all participants can attend a serial agenda of topical presentations and “keynote” addresses. Last week’s session topics included Renewable energy, Pile driving and impulsive sounds, Mapping and modeling, Sonar, Shipping, Soundscapes, Management and Policy, Estuaries and ocean, Seismic surveys, Behavioral responses, Mitigation, and Sensitivity and pathology.
Very thick. By the second day it started falling out of my ears. Our task on the final day was to summarize what we had synthesized over the week, and provide a map of these topics that we could navigate until our next conference a few years hence.
This last point has been a burr under everyone’s saddle for some time now. Set up initially to determine when mitigation or “harassment authorizations” need to be considered regarding “protected species” (meaning marine mammals) – the thresholds being ‘behavioral disruption’ and physiological damage.
Physiological damage – while in principle pretty unambiguous, turns out to be somewhat arbitrary when considering things like the impacts of sound quality, and cumulative impacts. Meanwhile, ‘behavioral disruption’ was set at a certain exposure level below physiological damage, but the ‘threshold’ was quickly found to be significantly higher than behavioral disruptions observed in many species, and significantly lower than what would be needed to encourage less damaging technologies.
And when you consider that fishes, zooplankton, and benthic invertebrates – while not as charismatic as whales and dolphins, are every bit as important to a healthy marine ecosystem, it might make more sense to regulate by way of a “risk continuum” action economy.
This is something that Brandon Southall has been suggesting for some time now. Jasco Scientific’s Bruce Martin illustrated this with his synthesizing comment that “if you are going to spend $10million on ‘bubble curtains’ (pile driving noise mitigation), but spending $10million on habitat restoration would be better for the environment, where should the money be spent?”
And when you consider that everything we do while industrializing the ocean has impacts, knowing the breadth of the impacts should inform mitigation (or rehabilitation) strategies in the context of the impacts, rather than our presumptions about the value of any particular mitigation.
