NMMF Welfare Acoustic Monitoring System (WAMS)
The National Marine Mammal Foundation’s Welfare Acoustic Monitoring System (NMMF WAMs) is a user-friendly interface for acoustic monitoring with stationary or towed arrays. It was built to monitor the whistle rate of a discrete population of bottlenose dolphins to monitor for distress whistling and welfare-related events.
It can be seamlessly used to integrate and summarize information from other Pamguard plug-ins to detect, localize, and total marine mammal vocalizations of interest in user-defined time bins from a certain species and direction of arrival.
NMMF WAMS provides a mean and daily plot to characterize vocal behavior of the focal population and/or species. Users can define how often to get summary reports from the program, and can also set email alerts to receive an email with a screenshot of the PAMGuard window whenever the vocal rate reaches a user-defined threshold. NMMF WAMs can also be used for post-processing of large datasets and is able to process data up to 4x faster than human visual processing.
Please direct any correspondence or questions to:
Brittany Jones, PhD