Automated methods for marine mammal passive acoustic research reach back at least 33 years, when Clark (1980) developed a direction-finding device to locate southern right whales. Automated methods soon became essential to the field, as rapid advances in technology and methodology led to huge volumes of passive-acoustic data, too large for convenient or timely manual analysis.
By the early 2000s, automated passive acoustic research and monitoring had become widespread, used worldwide by academic, industrial, governmental, and independent researchers and agencies. Development of automated analytical tools for detection, classification and localization (DCL) of marine mammals from acoustic data was blossoming into an independent field of research. By 2003, the DCL research community had grown large enough to warrant the organization of the first International Workshop on Detection, Classification, and Localization of Marine Mammals using Passive Acoustics.
The first workshop, organized by Francine Desharnais in Halifax, NS, Canada, focused on right whales...
