2025_programme: Geoacoustic inference for ecosystem monitoring of a seagrass meadow

• Day: June 16, Monday
    Location / Time: B. ERATO at 12:00-12:20
• Last minutes changes: -
• Session: 07. Inverse Problems in Acoustical Oceanography
  Organiser(s): Julien Bonnel, Stan Dosso
  Chairperson(s): Julien Bonnel, Stan Dosso
• Lecture: Geoacoustic inference for ecosystem monitoring of a seagrass meadow [Invited]
  Paper ID: 2275
  Author(s): Thomas Jerome, Megan Ballard, Kevin Lee, Colby Cushing, Kyle Capistrant-Fossa, Andrew McNeese, Robert Taylor, Preston Wilson, Kenneth Dunton
  Presenter: Thomas Jerome
  Abstract: Seagrasses play an important role as foundation species in many coastal ecosystems and act as a major sink in marine carbon cycles. Owing to the sensitivity of underwater sound propagation to bubbles produced during photosynthesis and gas-filled seagrass leaves, acoustic sensing has been established as an effective tool for monitoring seagrass meadows of variable species composition and abundance. A two-year continuous deployment of an acoustic monitoring system in seagrass beds on the central Texas coast in the western Gulf of Mexico revealed diurnal and seasonal variability in transmission loss measurements and the ambient soundscape. Trends in the acoustic metrics were linked to photosynthetic productivity and annual growth cycles [Ballard et al., JASA 2024]. While these metrics provide useful insight into overall trends in seagrass meadow condition and productivity, we were unable to collect quantitative estimates of ecological condition indicators directly from acoustic measurements. To address this need, we applied a geoacoustic inversion based on the Bayesian inference method to broadband measurements of transmission loss collected throughout the duration of the two-year monitoring experiment. The seagrass meadow is modeled as a shallow-water waveguide with the seagrass layer represented by an effective medium. Inferred model parameters are related to important condition indicators such as seagrass canopy height and shoot density, and estimates are compared with acoustic metrics from previous work and with ground-truth measurements of seagrass biomass.
• Corresponding author: Dr Thomas Jerome
  Affiliation: Applied Research Laboratories, The University of Texas at Austin
  Country: United States