The NAVIs SONus (NAVISON) report provides the first ever unified estimation of historical and future underwater noise levels for all European seas. Underwater noise from ships is recognised as a stress factor for marine life, particularly for cetaceans like whales and dolphins, who use sound to locate prey and communicate with each other. It can harm marine biodiversity and cause behavioural changes in animals. Using a single methodology, NAVISON has mapped underwater noise levels in all European seas for the first time, providing a comprehensive, pan-European overview, and allowing quantitative like-for-like comparisons of shipping contributions to ambient sound between regions, vessel categories, years, and forecast scenarios.

The ability to assess the effect on ocean noise of operational and technological changes in the marine shipping sector aimed at mitigating its environmental impact, against the backdrop of a steadily increasing demand for sea transport of goods and people, depends on the development of a reliable marine soundscape forecasting model. The European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), as part of its commitment towards greener shipping, has contracted to a consortium led by JASCO Applied Sciences a project to generate ship sound maps (soundscapes) for European seas over a time span from 2016 to 2050.

Several scientists from JASCO Applied Sciences participated in late May in the third edition of the OCEANOISE conference series. On the closing day of the conference, sessions chairs engaged with the audience in a plenary panel discussion. The outcome was a consensus on the need to issue an urgent call to action for the global implementation of effective technologies and regulations aimed at reducing human produced noise in the oceans. It was agreed that such a statement would be published on World Ocean Day.

A landmark Topical Collection on Western Gray Whales and Industry Seismic Operations of 10 peer-reviewed original articles has been published in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment. This comprehensive collection arises from decades of studies of the effects of offshore oil and gas development on the grey whales that gather every summer off Sakhalin Island, Russia. JASCO scientists were involved since 2004 in the underwater acoustics field work and analyses that fed into these papers, in addition to contributing to the yearslong real-time mitigation effort that ensured whales would not be exposed to excessive sound emissions from offshore activities and airguns.

Two leading players in the sector of shipping noise mitigation have formally joined forces as DW-ShipConsult GmbH becomes a fully owned affiliate of JASCO Applied Sciences (Deutschland) GmbH. The announcement was made by the respective Managing Directors, Thomas Büchler and Roberto Racca, after the acquisition agreement was signed in Berlin on May 2.

Roberto Racca and Klaus Lucke of JASCO Applied Sciences dive into the soundscape of the abyss in ECO Magazine’s Deep Sea special issue:

Life in the depths is adapted to wholly different conditions than exist near the surface, with increasingly high static pressure and decreasing or no light. Here, animals create their own light through bioluminescence. What of their hearing abilities? To understand how deep-sea animals perceive their environment, a group of Australian experts joined an international research expedition in the Indian Ocean. The question was whether deep-sea fish have a keener sense of hearing compared to their shallow-water counterparts.

In the recent Polar special issue of ECO Magazine, JASCO’s Roberto Racca and David Hannay describe how an ambitious acoustic monitoring program helped advance our understanding of Arctic ecology:

From 2006 to 2015, several oil and gas companies performed exploratory campaigns … in the northeastern Chukchi Sea. Some of these companies funded multidisciplinary long-term environmental projects to collect ecological baseline measurements and inform regulatory permit applications. The Chukchi Sea Environmental Studies Program (CSESP), the largest of these multi-year studies, included a large passive acoustic monitoring component. Led by JASCO Applied Sciences, the acoustic element of the program enabled scientists to describe how vocal marine mammals use the northeastern Chukchi Sea throughout the seasons, and to characterize the natural and human-made soundscape of the area.

Cynthia Pyć, Klaus Lucke, and Roberto Racca of JASCO Applied Sciences contributed an article to the recent Coral Reefs special issue of ECO Magazine.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the near shut-down of international tourism and the imposition of port closures and transit restrictions, significantly decreasing the volume of global ocean-going vessel traffic. A 2017 Caribbean coral reef acoustic monitoring study that serendipitously coincided with Tropical Storm Franklin could provide some early insight on the quieter soundscape that coral reef inhabitants are currently experiencing.

Team members from JASCO ‘s global locations joined millions of people worldwide in climate action demonstrations and marches through cities and smaller communities. As the Climate Strike date of 27 September, 11 a.m. swept around the globe, JASCO staff took to the streets to express their concern for the planet and demand for better policies to protect it.

The JASCO Applied Sciences global team has been joined in January 2018 by two distinguished scientists well known in the underwater acoustics and bioacoustics communities. Michael Ainslie has joined JASCO Applied Sciences (Deutschland) GmbH and will be based in The Hague, Netherlands; Klaus Lucke has joined JASCO Applied Sciences (Australia) Pty Ltd in the Brisbane office of the company.