NOAA Cetaceans and Sound Project (CetSound)

In a January 19, 2010 letter to the President's Council on Environmental Quality, NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco committed to improving the tools used by the agency to evaluate the impacts of human-induced noise on cetacean species. As a result, two data and product-driven working groups were convened in January 2011: the Underwater Sound-field Mapping Working Group and the Cetacean Density and Distribution Mapping Working Group. In May 2012, the working groups presented their products at a Symposium where potential management applications were discussed with a large multi-stakeholder audience.

The NOAA Cetaceans and Sound Project (CetSound) provides a single location where the public, academia, NGOs, and managers and scientists from NOAA and other federal agencies can find the latest data and metadata for cetacean and sound density and distribution.

To provide the best available information on the space/time distribution and density of cetacean species in the US EEZ, as well as the modeled sound fields from anthropgenic sources.

The Cetacean Density and Distribution Mapping Group (CetMap)'s objective is to create regional cetacean density and distribution maps that are time- and species-specific, using survey data and models that estimate density using predictive environmental factors.

The NOAA Cetaceans and Sound project provides png image thumbnails and downloadable data in ESRI shapefile format. All shapefiles contain XML and html-format metadata that adhere to the FGDC Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM).