About CATT

The motivation behind the CATT projects

This project aims to explore, develop, and validate all the steps involved in obtaining low cost, high quality estimates of trends in cetacean numbers using static acoustic monitoring with F-PODs.

Key elements include:

Partnerships with local groups, academic projects, and commercial ventures / aquaculture.
Methods of mooring F-PODs to facilitate servicing and reduce losses to a very low level.
Developing a data flow path to an open source repository.
Developing analytical methods to determine trends and other significant long term changes.
Outreach to local and academic communities engaging with any aspect: visual observations to support species discrimination, studies of social communication by cetaceans, studies of local impacts.
Development of 'data streaming' from selected sites.

Cetacean Acoustic Trend Tracking is a research project addressing the questions, what suitable low-cost long-term deployment opportunities for F-PODs may exist? What training and support is needed and what data issues, instrument losses etc may arise? And finally, what the data is able to show?
Sites include seaweed farms, deployments by local wildlife groups, fish tracking stations and other academic projects which may gain added value from cetacean activity data.

Chelonia Limited

F-POD manufacturer

Collaborators

Universities, Wildlife Trusts, Harbour Commissions

Research Development UK

Project Setup