The vision for the PAMGUARD initiative

To address the fundamental limitations of existing cetacean passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) software capabilities by creating an integrated PAM software infrastructure that is open source and available to all PAM users for the benefit of the marine environment.

PAMGUARD is an open source (publicly owned and freely available) development which provides:

• a flexible, modular software framework with basic application functionality
• comparable to popular existing PAM software (e.g. Ishmael, Rainbow Click, Logger) that is capable of working on multiple operating systems (e.g. Windows/Linux) and has the ability to incorporate new modules as they are developed to include additional detection, localisation, classification and sound visualisation functionalities.
• a versatile software/hardware interface to enable flexibility in the configuration of in-sea equipment (number of hydrophones, sensitivities, spacing and geometry).
• a PAM software application comprising of an initial set of bench-tested modules that are implemented in Java with comparable functionality of existing PAM software.
  

PAMGUARD is supported for ongoing development and maintenance activities and continues to evolve by:

• Soliciting and drawing upon both user and researcher creativity and innovation to enhance and expand its functionality.
• Benefiting from other ongoing development efforts designed to improve PAM effectiveness (for example, 3D tracking under SWSS, research on other aspects of PAM (3D localisation, classification))