ICES Working Group on Global Acoustic Interoperable Network (GAIN)

The inaugural meeting of the Global Acoustic Interoperable Network (GAIN) was held in Brest, France on the 8th April 2024. The overarching aim of this working group is to engage the international community to develop a framework to enable sharing and dissemination of processed water column backscatter data at a global scale. Our vision is to achieve a global observational system for processed active acoustic water column data that can be sustained over multi-decadal periods. This will match the timeframes over which long term trends in biological oceanic processes might be observed. Key to this will be to follow FAIR principles, to have rigorous adherence to metadata, documentation of processing methods (e.g. Haris et al. 2021) and to house the data products in a suitable format. Importantly, to facilitate uptake and impact, the product must be in a form that is readily understandable to researchers from other disciplines. This will allow easy comparison with other ocean observation and incorporation into models.

Figure 1.- What we can achieve together. Participants at the meeting in Brest (April 2024) drew acoustic trajectories from various research programmes that could be part of the first global database delivered by GAIN.

GAIN extends an open invitation to welcome the WGFAST and broader scientific community to participate. This can include:

• Join the community to contribute to discussions in this Github space and participate in workshops
• Inform of publicly available data holdings
• Make a product! Seek information about data processing methods to create interoperable outputs.
• Assist with linking to and/or guiding other disciples in the utilization and uptake of GAIN products
• Contribute in the elaboration of documents (processing protocols, conventions, etc.)
• Give us a hand in funding search and project submissions to maintain this working group.

Objectives

To achieve a global acoustic database which meets FAIR data principles we agreed the following objectives:

• Create an international panel of experts to provide guidance in acquisition and processing protocols towards the generation of an harmonized database. As an example there could be protocols to operate by default to use agreed echosounder settings when on transit and only change if there are survey specific needs. We also may provide tutorials to generate an agreed final product following community standards.
• Locate and centralize existing acoustic data in a common data portal in order to work out the size and diversity of data and propose adapted solutions to converge in a common data format.
• Provide an international framework which ensures funding and support to participants across the globe and over multi-decadal periods, to collect, process, and deliver acoustic data products.
• Provide the first reference global acoustic database, updated on an annual basis.

Next steps

To accomplish with the objectives we propose the following immediate actions:

• GAIN will operate inter-sessionally using online cloud-based solutions (this Github repository).
• Search for potential funding opportunities, propose project submissions to partners.
• Hold an in-person side meeting at the WGFAST in Reykjavik, Iceland.
• Draft guidelines for acquisition and processing for discussion with the GAIN partners.
• Create an application to check for compliant NetCDF + ICES metadata files.
• Search for new data holdings (Institutional, fishing vessels, ASV, moorings).
• Design of acknowledgement strategy to ensure crediting and recognition to data holders.

We have already started

GAIN is simply the officialisation and internationalisation of multiple efforts made in recent years. The Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) Ships of Opportunity (SOOP) Bioacoustics sub-Facility started in 2010 to make processed data products publicly available (see Haris et al. 2021) in NetCDF format and following ICES Metadata conventions (AcMeta). Later, the SONA and MESOPP projects united data contributions in the same format from CSIRO (Australia), the British Antarctic Survey (UK), and the Sorbonne University (France). This database continued growing afterwards, driven by geographical requirements of data users, with recent contributions from IRD (France) and Imarpe (Peru) in the context of an IRD Postdoctoral fellowhip (Ariza et al. 2022). As result, more than a million kilometers of data are publicly available in a common data format (Fig. 2). It is up to us, the international community of acousticians, to keep this network growing and to ensure that FAIR principles are met. Want to join us?

Figure 2.- Acoustic data publicly available by 2022. The database is in a common NetCDF data format, and is intended for final users: gridded, denoised, corrected water-column backscatter, documented following ICES Metadata conventions.

Practical notes

• The documents for each meeting are organised in different by year (2024, 2025).
• Discussions, proposals and questions will take place in the Issues tab of this repository.

Thank you for your participation,

Tim Ryan (CSIRO, Australia)
Alejandro Ariza (Ifremer, France)