Brooklyn College’s Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center (AREAC) director, Associate Professor Suresh Sethi, has joined a large collaboration spanning multiple state and federal agencies and a suite of other colleges and universities to advance autonomous drones for fisheries acoustics. These saildrones have been deployed across the Great Lakes and are returning data that are being used to assess the abundance and spatial distribution of fish. The wind-powered drones are silent and are helping to address long-standing questions in fisheries surveys, such as observing whether fish respond to conventional motorized survey ship noise in a manner that could bias abundance estimates. Sethi attended a recent workshop in December in Ithaca, New York, where the group discussed moving to the next phase of drone-based acoustics by collaborating with computer science colleagues to automate data processing for the large amounts of information generated by surface drones.
