Ocean Sound Analysis Software for Making Ambient Noise Trends Accessible (MANTA)

MANTA (Making Ambient Noise Trends Accessible) software is a tool for the community to enable comparisons between soundscapes and identification of ambient ocean sound trends required by ocean stakeholders. MANTA enhances the value of individual datasets by assisting users in creating thorough calibration metadata and internationally recommended products comparable over time and space to ultimately assess ocean sound at any desired scale up to a global level. The software package combines of two applications: MANTA Metadata App, which allows users to specify information about their recordings, and MANTA Data Mining App, which applies that information to acoustic recordings to produce consistently processed, calibrated time series products of sound pressure levels in hybrid millidecade bands. The main outputs of MANTA are daily .csv and NetCDF files containing 60-second spectral energy calculations in hybrid millidecade bands and daily statistics images. MANTA data product size and formats enable easy and compact transfer and archiving among researchers and programs that can be further averaged and explored to address user-specified questions.