A high frequency transient detector suitable for monitoring marine mammal activity

As part of a program to study the effect of man-made noise on marine mammals an EARS Acoustic Recording System) buoy was deployed in the Ligurian sea. The EARS buoy was deployed at a position with a high probability of marine mammal activity at a depth of around 950 m. It was operating for almost 19 days and collected acoustic data sampled at 192 kHz. The high sampling rate combined with the long deployment period leads to a unique data set. We show the day-by-day noise background spectrum. An automatic transient detector was used to find marine mammal activity. We classify the detected signals according to type and summarize them in daily histograms