SoundCoop: Tapping the potential of marine passive acoustic monitoring big data

The world today is driven by big data. It has the potential to transform raw values into actionable insights, as well as to determine emergent properties that drive decision-making and innovation. The value hidden in big data facilitates various organizations to decipher patterns, make predictions, and further management objectives across a wide variety of applications. Marine passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has generated petabytes of data that are utilized by researchers, resource managers, industry, as well as regulators to examine soundscapes and their ecological and human-related drivers in marine ecosystems throughout the global ocean. These efforts are aimed at promoting species protection, lowering noise in protected places, and investigating blue economy activity in coastal and offshore environments.

However, harnessing the value of marine PAM depends on effective and efficient data management, state-of-the-art analytical tools, and a proper understanding of aligning insights with organizational goals and societal needs. There is an urgent imperative to address these enormous challenges to efficiently extract marine information.

Making significant advances in this direction, in a new study, an international team of researchers, led by Research Scientist Carrie C. Wall from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, and NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, U.S., has pioneered the Sound Cooperative (SoundCoop) project. Their novel findings were made available online and have been published in the journal Big Earth Data on 4 December 2025.

Dr. Wall, the corresponding author of the study, highlights the major contributions of their work. “SoundCoop builds community-focused cyberinfrastructure to promote improved, scalable and sustainable processing and access of marine PAM data for management, science, industry and military applications. Driven by cross-institutional participation representing a diversity of data collection methods and conditions, it establishes guidance for standardized processing of ocean sound level metrics using freeware software toolkits and developed core tools and processes that support open science.”

Notably, the scope of SoundCoop is enormous. It combines 12 projects (AEON, AFSC-ALTIMA, BOEM-Cornell, ESONS, FRAM, JOMOPANS, MBARI-MARS, NEFSC, NRS, NYSDEC-Cornell, SanctSound, and SWAL), 10 recording systems (AMAR, AUH, AURAL, DSG, HARP, icListen, MARU, SEH, SoundTrap, and SonoVault), 7 geographic regions (Acrtic Ocean, Central California Coast, Fram Strait, Gulf of Maine, Mid Atlantic, North Sea, and Southeast US Estuary), 17 year span of data (Sep 26, 2006–Apr 23, 2023), and 2–256 kHz sample data (with duty cycles varying from 2 min per hour to continuous).

“In our study, four comparative analyses that connect PAM monitoring efforts and integrate non-acoustic data illustrate how interoperable sound level metrics support a more coherent and synoptic perspective on ocean soundscapes using methods that current and future PAM projects can leverage. Such a framework around PAM big data offers the opportunity to revolutionize large-scale marine ecology and oceanography in similar ways to other transformative approaches for understanding environmental patterns and processes at global scales,” remarks Dr. Wall.

Overall, the present work underlines that big data can serve as much more than just vast quantities of information through value harnessing, becoming an important catalyst for informed decisions and progress.

Reference
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/20964471.2025.2583505

About University of Colorado Boulder
Established in 1876, the University of Colorado Boulder, U.S., is Colorado’s leading public research university. It is the state's flagship university and a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU). CU Boulder is home to five Nobel Laureates since 1989 and the only university to send space instruments to every planet in the solar system. It aligns efforts to achieve research and creative excellence, global sustainability impact and the success of all students, faculty and staff. The vision of CU Boulder is to transform lives in service to a just and sustainable world.

Website: https://www.colorado.edu/

About Carrie C. Wall from University of Colorado Boulder
Carrie C. Wall is a Research Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, U.S., since 2013, and is currently stationed at NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. She completed her Ph.D. in Marine Science from the University of South Florida in 2012. Her research interests include marine ecology, marine biodiversity, fisheries, marine biology, conservation biology, animal behavior, fish ecology, conservation, marine environment, and biodiversity. Dr. Wall has authored over 50 research articles and received about 700 citations.