Earth Day was celebrated globally this year on 22 April, and the JASCO Applied Sciences team joined in the movement to keep the planet beautiful with two litter clean-up initiatives in the company’s Halifax and Victoria offices in Canada. JASCO members and friends gathered in numbers to tackle rubbish in local parks and neighbourhoods. The collected items were later sorted for recycling as far as possible. But personal involvement to helping the planet does not stop at just one day. A member of the JASCO team in the UK embraces the environment on a monthly basis by organizing litter clean ups in his community, and many others throughout company branches worldwide contribute in whatever way they can to reduce their environmental footprint every day of the year.

JASCO Applied Sciences is playing a key environmental role during the construction of the first offshore wind farm in North America near Block Island, Rhode Island.  

JASCO Applied Sciences, under subcontract to Tetra Tech Inc., is providing underwater acoustic measurement and monitoring services to Deepwater Wind during the installation of the Block Island Wind Farm. JASCO is conducting field data acquisition and subsequent analysis and interpretation for short- and long-term studies of noise from pile driving and related construction activities. The work is supported by staff from one of JASCO’s USA offices, located in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The September issue of Marine Mammal Research Newsletter features the article “Decoding the mysterious songs of fin whales” about a cetacean research project by Barbara Koot performed in collaboration with JASCO Applied Sciences.

Koot, who conducted the research as part of her MSc thesis at the University of British Columbia, used JASCO’s acoustic analysis software framework to process large datasets of underwater sound recordings and automatically detect fin whale calls. Fisheries and Oceans Canada, another collaborator in the study, supported the deployment and retrieval of acoustic recording instruments offshore the British Columbia coastline.

JASCO Applied Sciences (Canada) Ltd has been selected by Port Metro Vancouver and Ocean Networks Canada to provide real-time passive acoustic monitoring of vessel traffic in the Strait of Georgia, BC, Canada, in order to study the potential impacts of shipping noise on marine mammals.

Two listening stations—each comprised of an AMAR Observer with a small spatial array of hydrophones and an AMAR Projector—were deployed on the major shipping route to Vancouver. These two systems are connected to shore in real-time via Ocean Networks Canada’s VENUS fibre optic cabled subsea observatory, which allows people and automated systems ashore to listen, measure, and characterize underwater sounds in the Strait of Georgia in real-time. AMAR Projectors calibrate and test the receiving arrays and will be useful in future planned experiments in underwater communications and navigation. These listening stations form part of the Enhancing Cetacean Habitat and Observation (ECHO) Program.

JASCO has begun monitoring and measuring underwater sound at the Fundy Ocean Research Center for Energy (FORCE) tidal energy berth sites in the Bay of Fundy, Parrsboro, Nova Scotia.

The cabled monitoring system, designed and assembled in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, is “world-leading ocean technology that helps protect our marine environment,” said Scott Carr, CEO of JASCO Applied Sciences. It is deployed on FORCE’s Fundy Advanced Sensor Technology mini-platform, an underwater framework that captures data from the site with onboard sensing equipment. “To harness the enormous power of the Bay of Fundy responsibly, we have to understand it. The FAST platforms give us a clearer, moment-by-moment picture of what’s happening under the water,” said FORCE general manager Tony Wright.

CBC News recently interviewed Dr. Peter Cott of Environment and Natural Resources (Government of the Northwest Territories) and adjunct at the University of Alberta. Cott has been studying sounds made by burbot under the ice at Great Slave Lake, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. 

The fish were held in a large experimental enclosure called the Lota-tron, a cubical net pen 10 m per side. Their calls were recorded with JASCO’s autonomous multi-channel acoustic recorder, the AMAR.

John Moloney discussed JASCO’s experience with exporting in a recent interview with The Chronicle Herald newspaper in Halifax, NS. JASCO is a global services company, and as such “we go where our customers need us,” says Moloney.

In February, Ocean Networks Canada posted an article highlighting JASCO’s involvement in one of the world’s most advanced cabled ocean observatories. JASCO’s AMAR Observer is helping ONC acoustically monitor orcas in the Salish Sea.

JASCO began collaborating with ONC’s Innovation Centre in 2012. Since September 2013, two AMAR Observers have been operating on ONC’s observatory in the Strait of Georgia. The Observers can collect and deliver acoustic and oceanographic data in real time, around the clock and throughout the year.

Kat Nikolich, a Western Washington University (WWU) graduate research student, is collaborating with JASCO Applied Sciences to deploy one of its Autonomous Multichannel Acoustic Recorders (AMARs) this summer to measure the vocal repertoires of harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) breeding in the northern Strait of Georgia, BC. Nikolich, who is completing a master’s degree in biology, will work with JASCO bioacoustics expert and pinniped specialist Dr. Héloïse Frouin-Mouy.

The specialized acoustic recorder will be anchored to the seabed near one of the largest seal haul-outs in the region, on the south shore of Hornby Island. The device will record sounds continuously from June through September, spanning the full breeding season of the seals. At the same time, a research team from WWU, comprised of a dedicated team of undergraduate students led by Kat, will observe the seals’ activity from the shore nearby.

June 8 has been celebrated as World Oceans Day globally since 2002 and has been officially recognized by the UN since 2008. World Oceans Day aims to promote ocean conservation, foster education about marine life, and bring communities together to celebrate the things we love about the ocean. 

This year JASCO Applied Sciences will join in the celebration of World Oceans day at two events. First, on Friday June 6 JASCO will have an educational exhibit at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, Nova Scotia along with other groups involved in ocean and nature conservation including the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Hope for Wildlife, and the World Wildlife Fund. School groups in the Halifax area will be travelling to the museum for a fun day of ocean education.

JASCO Applied Sciences has deployed since early March two of its AMAR underwater sound monitoring systems on the VENUS underwater observatory for a technology demonstration and data gathering mission planned to last several months. VENUS (Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea) is a cabled ocean observatory, in the Salish Sea coastal waters of British Columbia, operated by Ocean Networks Canada.

JASCO’s AMARs have been deployed at two locations on the VENUS Ocean Observatory in the Strait of Georgia. The primary purpose of this mission is to demonstrate the multi-sensor data collection and streaming capability of the AMAR. Of specific interest to scientists are the real-time detection, identification and localization of calls from individual Southern Resident Killer Whales, and the measurement of the underwater noise from vessels to which these animals may be exposed.

JASCO Applied Sciences’ Briand Gaudet joins the Bedford Institute of Oceanography and other biologists at the Gully Marine Protected Area Exhibition to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Gully’s formal designation as a Marine Protected Area. This one-day science outreach event takes place at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History in Halifax on Saturday May 10, 2014. The exhibit will include interactive displays about the Gully and the deep-sea creatures that inhabit this unique ecosystem.

Briand’s contribution to the event will be to enable attendees to see if they can “speak whale”. When participants imitate sounds of marine fauna into a microphone (after listening to examples), JASCO’s specialized detection software shows them a visual rendering of their vocalization and tells them what species they sound like, be it humpback whale, orca, bearded seal, or even snapping shrimp.

JASCO scientists Julien Delarue and Marie-Noël Matthews delivered a 2-day course on bioacoustics to 15 researchers and resource managers from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) at the Maurice Lamontagne Institute in Mont-Joli, QC on 20-21 March 2014. The course included modules on:

• Acoustic fundamentals
• Sound propagation modelling
• Effects of anthropogenic noise on marine life
• Mitigation and modelling of underwater sound
• International regulatory frameworks for underwater sound
• Acoustic monitoring programs and equipment
• Case studies from JASCO’s diverse project portfolio

The “JASCO Sound Crew” placed first out of 37 teams at the inaugural competition of Brain War, a fundraising event for the Discovery Centre held Saturday February 22 at Halifax’s Saint Mary’s University. The team consisting of Terry Deveau, Mikhail Zykov, Christopher Whitt, and Nicole Chorney competed in a 6 hour marathon of brain-straining challenges that tested their knowledge in science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

The JASCO team went on to win against the four other highest ranking groups at the February 27 Gala event and final where they faced off on stage in front of peers and spectators and won the championship trophy. The Gala was hosted by CBC News Nova Scotia host Tom Murphy and CBC Mainstreet's Stephanie Domet.

JASCO completed a complex, offshore piling noise recording program for BP, west of Shetland. Sound from piling activity to install a large platform jacket was recorded at a number of static and mobile recording locations using a series of JASCO’s AMAR G3s (Autonomous Multichannel Acoustic Recorders).