Laurel Chen 
At the intersection of ideas and action, this is Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

I’m Laurel Chen, Longitude fellow from Rice University.

Welcome to our Longitudes of Imagination series where we are exploring the roles of individuals, technologies and research that is helping advance understanding in ocean science and space technology!

In this series, we spoke with the members of the SanctSound project that is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Navy. It is a project to better understand underwater sounds within the U.S. national marine sanctuaries.

In today’s episode we are featuring highlights from a conversation I led with Ms. Lindsey Peavey Reeves, a West Coast Region Sanctuary Soundscape Monitoring Project Coordinator at National Marine Sanctuary Foundation in California.

As a fellow and biomedical engineer by training, I was interested to hear about the synergistic intersection between our work, which is grounded by high technicality. But I was also interested in hearing about what the SanctSound project was, and the impacts the humans and infrastructure had on the ocean. We started our conversation with a deeper dive into her current position, as well as what her role entailed.       

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Lindsey Peavey Reeves
I am the sanctuary soundscape monitoring coordinator for the west coast of the United States. I work for the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, which is housed under NOAA, and I am on staff at the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation. It’s a little complicated, but it’s through an MOU, a financial agreement that this government office has with the Sanctuary Foundation, which is hugely beneficial in lots of ways. One of those ways is that they can hire staff to do these specialized roles, take on these specialized roles, which is what I’m doing on the west coast. So I’m based in Santa Barbara, California, but I work really closely with all of the five sanctuaries on the west coast of the US, from the Canadian border, the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, down through California. So we have the greater Farallones sanctuary, the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary, Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and then Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. I work really closely with those five sanctuaries to monitor underwater sound in and around the sanctuary. We work with a really large network of partners to accomplish this, because it’s a really large undertaking. It’s hard for us to do it solely as one organization. So we work across a lot of different organizations. We had over 50 individuals that were a part of that project, over 20 different organizations, so that’s kind of the magnitude when I’m talking about partnerships. It’s quite large, both on the coming up with the resources to make it happen, but also the implementation of it as well.

But what do I do in particular? Mostly it is coordination. So I do jump on boats a lot, and do a lot of the field work myself. As I said, I’m based in Santa Barbara, California, so Channel Islands is in my backyard and easy for me to access and to help out with fieldwork. But some of those sanctuaries I mentioned are quite far away. And so what I do is work with the staff and the partners that are in those local areas and we coordinate the vessel time, getting all the gear in the right place at the right time in and out of the water, and just making sure that we’re trying to collect data as continuously as possible.

I also work with a team of analysts that are also scattered all around the west coast, and even beyond that. They are really focused on working with the data once it comes out of the water. We have all of these standardized procedures that we use across the entire national network of our sound monitoring project. Our west coast team of analysts uses those procedures to process the data and come up with standardized data products. So things like sound levels over time where we might tease out a specific sound source that we’re interested in, like humpback whale calls or fish chorusing, snapping shrimp sounds, things like that. I do a lot of the coordination of the fieldwork, data collection, and then the data processing. And then we also have this parallel process that we feed our data products in. That’s the archive of the raw data and the data products. And this is what makes this project really impactful because we have open access to our methods, but also our results.

One of the most challenging but rewarding things that I do is bridging the science that we’re producing to the management applications and how we’re actually going to solve some of these conservation problems. Some of that is producing peer reviewed publications or contributing to them, working with the academic community, and then some of that is really just working with our staff at the state and federal levels to try to better manage our marine protected areas and our protected resources.

Laurel
Thank you so much for that really comprehensive rundown, Lindsey. I was hearing you talk, I was just… I felt so empowered by how broad your work and this organization reaches. It seems to be not only science-related, but there’s a lot of social and governance-related things with it as well. So to me, that makes me really happy. I studied engineering in college but I really- this year was the only year where I actually got to branch out, take a few more humanities courses. It’s makes me really happy to hear what you are working on right now, and this bigger position and role really brings a lot of people together, a lot of people in different specialties to really create this richer understanding of something. And it’s open-access as well, which is something that I really think was super cool, because now everyone can access it if they want to learn more about not just SanctSound, but also the other projects that you’ve been working on too. So that’s super cool. You touched on this a little bit, but I was actually really curious to hear what you loved most about the SanctSound project.

Lindsey
Yeah, sure. One of the things I love about soundscape monitoring just as a discipline is that it’s holistic. You actually gave a good description of how it’s holistic, like our approach to it, with needing to work with people and building relationships and trust and expertise, as I’ve said, but from a scientific aspect I love that it’s holistic in that we’re looking at entire ecosystems and how they’re functioning. In our case, we’re doing stationary monitoring mostly, and so we’re looking really intensely at one place but over time. You know, we’re listening to all of the different sounds that are happening in concert. The biological sounds, fish, snapping shrimp, whales, all of the fun critters that we think about when we think of marine ecosystems, but also the biophysical sound that we might not think are noisy, but they actually can be quite noisy at times, like tides and currents, wind and waves, earthquakes, things like that. Hurricanes. So we’re listening to all of those things happening at the same time: rain storms passing by at the same time that dolphins are chatting it up. And then also anthropogenic sounds. So all of the things that humans are doing, all the human activities that are happening in these coastal areas, in our case in these national marine sanctuaries. We do have some remote ones, but on the west coast we have quite a few that have strongholds in the coastal regions. So we have military activities happening, we have vessel traffic, whether it’s large commercial tankers or fishing vessels, or recreational vessels, dive boats, things like that. Kayaks. I mean, all kinds of ways that we are accessing these spaces now. And so we’re able to listen to all of those things happening at the same time. I think that’s really powerful. And one of the things that I like most about this project, because we can really tease apart each one of those things individually, because we do have such amazing, really smart people working on this project that can do things like artificial intelligence, and use these automated techniques to draw out specific sound sources, if we just want to listen to killer whales, we can do that. So if an event happens, we can detect that, and so we can detect a disturbance to the ecosystem. I just love that we have that capability and that power in this holistic sampling approach.

I also think that underwater sound in general is very relatable to people. We use sound. Most people who are able to hear really value that sense, and they really relate to how important it is for an underwater organism to thrive and to really succeed in reproduction and communication and their social activities. So I think we have a real benefit with underwater sound and being able to translate what we’re learning and why it’s important to people. So I love that.

Laurel
Switching gears, how did you develop interest in this field, whether it be marine science or just soundscaping? What was your pathway that you traversed from point A all the way to today?

Lindsey
How much time do we have? [laughter] When I was in school, one of my basketball coaches was a science teacher. And she was one of my mentors. She suggested that I do some science camps over the summer. I was mostly doing sports camps. I was like, oh, that sounds fun, I’ll do something a little different. So she’s really the one who got me into this Marine Science Camp in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It’s called Science at Sea. You might be familiar with this organization, because now they’ve grown and they do college programs, and experiential learning programs, which was sort of my first experience doing that hands-on type of learning. I spent 10 days on the campus and then we spent 10 days on a schooner, a type of sailboat, putting everything that we had just learned in the classroom into practice. And so that was my first really like, Aha moment. There was a female oceanographer who was leading that part of our program, her name was Cheryl Peach. I’ll never forget her because I was always like, wait, you can get paid to explore the ocean and learn new things and go places people have never been before, and pull things up out of the ocean and just see what’s under there? It was just so like, Well, I want to do this, of course I want to do this. It was really empowering for me to see this professor being the person in charge on this boat and everyone following her lead. And so I was just like, I want to do that. This sounds cool. So that was my first time that I fell in love with marine science as a career. I really never lost that love for the whole science of the ocean and exploration. And so I pursued that in college.

After school, I moved to California. I didn’t know anybody, didn’t have a job at the time, but I moved to San Diego. I thought I wanted to pursue marine conservation but I wasn’t sure. Got some really awesome experience working in grassroots conservation, Community Conservation, and met some amazing people, from fishermen to community members to these amazing marine conservationists that are traveling the world. And that’s when I first started working with the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration. From then I went to Duke University and studied coastal environmental management. And that’s actually where I first started learning about bioacoustics. I got to jump on some Antarctic research programs where they were going down for two months at a time on these research vessels, and I was brought on to the project because I had spent so much time at sea at that point. I had a lot of experience doing visual observations, being able to spot different types of wildlife, whether turtles, birds, mammals, and then identify them. And that’s just one way that you can start doing population assessments. That’s why I was brought onto the project, but once I was there I was just a sponge and wanted to do everything. I started working with some of my colleagues on that project who were in bioacoustics. And so I really just dove headfirst and learned the ropes from them, and then just kind of fell in love with bioacoustics as well.

Laurel
Thank you so much. That was such a whirlwind but I really appreciate- you really trace this through everything and I think you were also able to do such a really cool project like Antarctica. That’s crazy! Segueing more into SanctSound as a project now, firstly I was wondering if you could summarize things in a few sentences to a layperson, and then also what would be your big take home message, or what is this driving significance of the project?

Lindsey
So SanctSound began in 2017, but we didn’t start actually putting sound recorders underwater until 2018 and 2019 in our sanctuary system in the United States. What the project aims to do is to monitor in as many locations as we can. In our case, we were able to monitor in 30 different stationary monitoring locations across the sanctuary system. So in US waters and territories, trying to establish baseline understanding of underwater soundscapes. We’re looking at the holistic soundscape, so all of these sounds that are happening at the same time. In our case, since we’re listening in 30 stationary locations, we want to establish baseline understanding in those locations. What’s the average sound levels? How noisy or quiet? Is it usually in the fall, in the spring, in the summer, in the winter? And what are the specific noise inputs that are common there? So maybe it’s common to have lots of biophysical sounds, lots of storms passing through, or different tidal flows, things like that. We want to understand the biologics that are normally there. And in some cases we have different animals that are migratory, so they might be present during some parts of the year and not during others. We want to understand what are those typical patterns of biological activity that we can record with our underwater microphones called hydrophones.

We are also at the same time recording temperature. So we are trying to understand the environmental conditions as well. And then again, we’re trying to understand what are the human inputs of sound? Because we want to have an understanding of, okay, what’s the current level of what we might consider noise pollution, what’s the current vessel activity, and some of our monitoring sites, they’re very near ports and busy harbors. And so we would expect to have the steady stream of vessel activity that we can record. We can also monitor vessels in other ways too, so we can integrate all of these different types of data that are coming in. And then we want to also understand more of the transient sounds, things that are only happening periodically, like maybe military testing that’s happening underwater. That’s the holistic sampling that we’re doing with SanctSound, and we’re trying to establish those baselines. So across a three year period in this case, we want to understand what is the typical or the average soundscape in these locations, particularly so we can understand disturbance, so if there’s an event that happens that would disrupt that average soundscape, we want to be able to understand that. 

I’ll give you a great example that everyone will be able to relate to, and that’s the COVID 19 pandemic. You know, COVID affected literally everything in our lives, but especially ship traffic. It rocked the international economy and it really influenced how goods were being moved by ships across these large waterways. We had an acoustic signature of that disruption in our records. We were able to record the reduction in noise input from vessels at these locations that typically would have the higher inputs of the vessel traffic noise.

Laurel
I think the example that you gave with COVID-19, I guess I learned today that COVID-19 did impact us, but also in another way towards sea life, ocean life. So that was super cool. I actually didn’t think of that being such an impactful use case, all of these soundscaping applications.

Lindsey
Yeah, COVID was quite a bummer for humans, but marine life has gotten a little reprieve. They’ve gotten a reprieve from the noise pollution.

Laurel
Yeah, for sure. Based on your experience with working in this field, or just in ocean science in general, what do you think really propels innovation in this field?

Lindsey
I think that it’s just- we have a lot of problems that we have to solve, and I think some of the problems are really big. It really requires a lot of creative and talented and smart people to come together to think outside of the box to come up with innovative ways to approach problems. We have a lot of what you would call “wicked problems” that don’t seem like they have a straightforward solution, or even any solution at all. But there really are ways to get win-win solutions. You know, maybe It’s not going to be one part of the puzzle is winning the whole game, it’s gonna be like a complete success story, but there’s ways that we can improve livelihoods and conservation status of species and people’s connection with the ocean, the climate situation, there’s ways that we can improve all of these things at the same time. That I think is what really inspires innovation, because it is a necessity. Yeah, we’d need to think outside of the box and approach things from a different angle.

Laurel
Absolutely. And I’m hoping that my generation hopefully has some good ideas in regards to all those issues, or the wicked issues, too, that you’ve mentioned. So I have lots of hope.

Lindsey
That innovation stuff we just talked about is what gives me a lot of hope, because I think we do have so many tools now that we can draw from to come up with those solutions to these wicked problems. I think that putting a lot of effort into sustainability is what really is interesting to me. So I do try to couch a lot of the things that I work on in my job, and in my role, into a larger vision of sustainability. And I know a lot of my peers do as well. So we are always on the same wavelength in that- but I’m always trying to think into the future, and how is this going to work towards this common sustainability goal that I think we have across sectors. Of course, economies want to be sustained just as much as we want to sustain ocean life and the health of our ecosystems. And so we have commonalities there. We have common ground. That’s been really motivating for me. Just always want to be working towards making things better for the next generation.

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Laurel
Talking with Lindsey, I realized how far her work reached, from the Channel Islands in Santa Barbara, California, to the sanctuaries all along the Pacific West Coast, stretching even up to Canada. I was amazed to hear that ocean fieldwork amassed large amounts of data that were open access, which is hard to find these days. When Lindsey told me about how holistic soundscape monitoring was, from “snapping shrimp,” to biophysical sounds like wind and waves, tides and currents, to even sounds of human vessel activity, I became inspired by how applicable all this data is to humans. I also found it quite interesting that the COVID-19 pandemic even impacted the ocean, due to lower ship traffic, generating acoustic signatures for future soundscapers. As Lindsey mentioned, “we use sound,” and it’s “very relatable to people.” Harnessing technology to be able to translate underwater sound to the public, makes me hopeful that we can pay it forward for the next generation of explorers!

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