Spatiotemporal characterisation of underwater noise through semantic trajectories

Underwater noise pollution from human activities, particularly shipping, has been recognised as a serious threat to marine life. The sound generated by vessels can have various adverse effects on fish and aquatic ecosystems in general. In this setting, the estimation and analysis of the underwater noise produced by vessels is an important challenge for the preservation of the marine environment. In this paper we propose a model for the spatiotemporal characterisation of the underwater noise generated by vessels. The approach is based on the reconstruction of the vessels’ trajectories from Automatic Identification System (AIS) data and on their deployment in a spatiotemporal database. Trajectories are enriched with semantic information like the acoustic characteristics of the vessels’ engines or the activity performed by the vessels. We define a model for underwater noise propagation and use the trajectories’ information to infer how noise propagates in the area of interest. We develop our approach for the case study of the fishery activities in the Northern Adriatic Sea, an area of the Mediterranean Sea which is well known to be highly exploited. We implement our approach using MobilityDB, an open source geospatial trajectory data management and analysis platform, which offers spatiotemporal operators and indices improving the efficiency of our system. We use this platform to conduct various analyses of the underwater noise generated in the Northern Adriatic Sea, aiming at estimating the impact of fishing activities on underwater noise pollution and at demonstrating the flexibility and expressiveness of our approach.