Researchers use AI to detect schools of herring from acoustic data

Tracking the health of underwater species is critical to understanding the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems. Unfortunately, it's a time-consuming process -- biologists conduct studies with echosounders that use sonar to determine water and object depth, and they manually interpret the resulting 2D echograms. These interpretations are often prone to error and require pricey software like Echoview. Fortunately, a team of research scientists hailing from the University of Victoria in Canada are developing a machine learning method for detecting specific biological targets in acoustic survey data. In a preprint paper ("A Deep Learning based Framework for the Detection of Schools of Herring in Echograms"), they say that their approach -- which they tested on schools of herring -- might measurably improve the accuracy of environmental monitoring.