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Today, NOAA Fisheries releases our Technical Guidance for Assessing the Effects of Anthropogenic Sound on Marine Mammal Hearing.
You may recall that in June, NOAA released a draft Ocean Noise Strategy Draft Roadmap. The Technical Guidance is an example of the sort of targeted action that the Roadmap recommends we conduct.
The Technical Guidance will contribute to the protection of marine mammals from underwater human-made sound through updated science. It provides acoustic threshold levels for determining onset of auditory impacts to marine mammals, which will improve our assessment of hearing impacts and inform mitigation development. It is intended to be used by NOAA analysts and managers, other federal agencies, and other relevant user groups and stakeholders to better predict how a marine mammal’s hearing will respond to sound exposure.
We have been working on this Technical Guidance for some time. It has undergone three separate rounds of peer review and public comment. You can view our responses to public comments in the Federal Register.
We understand there may be questions. So we also created informational webinars and explain in the associated Federal Register Notice how NOAA and applicants should transition to use of this Technical Guidance. All this information will be available on our Office of Protected Resources website. Amy R. Scholik-Schlomer, Ph.D.
Fishery Biologist (Protected Resources Acoustic Coordinator) NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service Office of Protected Resources, Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle Conservation Division
1315 East-West Hwy. SSMC3, Rm. 13605 Silver Spring, MD 20910 (301) 427-8449 Email: http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/acoustics/ |