Atlantic Salmon Research Joint Venture: Development of Acoustic Tracking Capabilities for Drifter Buoys

Fisheries and Oceans Canada's Partnership Fund provided $86,250 to the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN) under Dr. Fred Whoriskey at Dalhousie University for the development and testing of new acoustic telemetry technology.

Hundreds of drifter buoys are deployed annually by multiple countries including Canada, and each buoy has the battery power and physical resilience to waves and biofouling to be active for approximately two years. If the buoys of the Drifter Network are modified to include acoustic receiver technology reporting detections of acoustically tagged animals in real-time, they could become a valuable asset to the scientific community interested in tracking salmon and other species in the offshore. The work involves integrating an existing VEMCO-cabled acoustic receiver into the compact and easy to deploy MetOcean SVP Drifter buoy. OTN will deploy it locally off Halifax and do range testing to determine detection efficiency for a variety of models of acoustic tags. Following this, feedback will be provided to the companies for any necessary modifications and the final version will be developed.

Project Number: Gulf2016.21
Year(s): 2017
Partner: Ocean Tracking Network, Dalhousie University
Principal Investigator(s): Dr. Fred Whoriskey
Eco-region: Atlantic