discussion / Marine Conservation  / 26 November 2020

Calling all hydrophone users!

Who are we?

We are Open Acoustic Devices, makers of the AudioMoth. AudioMoth is a low-cost, open-source acoustic monitoring device widely used for terrestrial monitoring and surveying. It has helped improve the accessibility of environmental research in this area by making acoustic data collection more accessible.

Our motivations

To prevent the continued decline in biodiversity, it is important to develop new approaches and tools to expand monitoring coverage beyond the terrestrial focus of our current device. How can we expand the monitoring coverage of marine environments? With the success of the original AudioMoth, we aim to do so through accessibility. Reaching out to the marine acoustics community is the first part of Open Acoustic Devices’ product development process for a device which does just this.

What are we doing?

We are calling all marine and freshwater hydrophone users to take part in an online survey about hydrophone usage. We wish to understand the context in which you use your hydrophones, where you are using them, and how you are deploying them for conservation and environmental research. 

This initial survey is intended for existing hydrophone users, or those that have been wanting to use hydrophones for specific tasks, but haven’t yet had an opportunity to do so. If you are not a hydrophone user, but know someone that is, we would really appreciate it if you could share and pass this survey on to them to partake. The more people we get to participate with, the more we’ll understand how hydrophones are used. 

What are we going to do with the results?

Soon after this survey we will share anonymised findings on the data we collect here. 

These results will help steer the initial design of our first prototype for a low-cost, open-source hydrophone. We aim to iteratively develop this new device alongside users in real-world deployments going forward. By seeking these insights early in the design process, we hope to prioritise what our future users find most important in their marine monitoring equipment.

The survey

Take the hydrophone survey here.

Please share this survey with anyone else you feel would be willing and able to contribute to the development of accessible marine acoustic monitoring tools.

Thank you for your time,
The Open Acoustic Devices team.




Survey Results​

The attached report presents the results of the hydrophone survey, performed between 26th November 2020 and the 20th December 2020. 

If you missed out in particcipating, we'll be leaving the survey open for as long as neccesary to build up a better idea of use-cases. You can take the survey HERE 

We can then update the results later in the year. 

 

hydrophone_survey_results.pdf