Hydra - The Hydrophone Data Repository

The Hydra story

Around the Pacific Northwest, researchers from a variety of federal and local agencies, universities, and tribes in aggregate are using several hundred hydrophones to conduct research studies on movement patterns of aquatic animals. Each program is characterized by numerous tagged animals that move and a relatively limited number of acoustic receivers that are located to address a significant question for individual programs. Importantly, these tagged animals move over larger domains than individual receiver arrays. These researchers have recognized the value of coordinating placement of hydrophones to improve their collective listening capability and ability to address emergent, larger-scale management questions. Researchers needed the ability to efficiently share detections of each others tag codes to enable the larger research collaboration. Hydra was developed to facilitate data sharing and research coordination for these researchers.

If you would like to join Hydra please contact Sound Data Management, creators of Hydra.

Our data principals

• Hydra ensures data integrity as it joins hydrophone-generated data files with receiver deployments and animal/tag information via an automated protocol.
• Data ownership occurs via tag codes. Researchers can only view detections of tag codes they own or have been shared with them. Tag codes are by default private. Unless a tag owner chooses to share their data, they are solely able to access detections of their tag codes.
• Hydra respects the diverse data sharing needs of individual researchers. Hydra is designed to facilitate data sharing in that tag code detections can be shared between research partners, agencies, or made public with the click of a button. Yet each research partner controls if and when they share data; Hydra has no data sharing or publishing requirement.

Hydra in the press

Click here to read a nice blog on Hydra by Jonathan Callahan of Mazama Science.