EchoStream: Revolutionizing Echosounder Data Analysis in the Cloud
Scientists exploring oceans and fresh water using echosounders often handle massive data, requiring extensive manual or semi-automatic processing. Echostream, designed by Sustainovate AS, allows automatic and efficient large-scale rapid (re)processing of acoustic data , leveraging the full potential of cloud capabilities. Utilizing scalable Azure cloud resources, this innovative service renders echosounder data to multi-thread processing and uses a modular data processing setup. As a result, it can process a decade’s worth of data (typically around 40 TB) in a matter of hours, marking a significant enhancement over the previous months-long processing duration.
The company hereby follows international standards, prioritizes transparency, and engages the scientific community in acoustic data processing.
This advanced echosounder processing method is currently undergoing testing by Sustainovate and partners (among others Cupar Analytics Ltd) using the OceanBox Data Platform.
This cutting-edge service automates labor-intensive tasks in echosounder data research, making the preparation of large datasets for scientific analysis more efficient. Operating in a dedicated cloud environment allows easy uploading of extensive RAW datasets and smooth execution of core processing tasks. Our platform speeds up tasks like extracting metadata, deriving vital biological metrics, and identifying features such as fish schools and zooplankton swarms. This results in data prepared for advanced analysis in much less time than traditional pre-processing methods.
The output from the current version of the service can be used to study the biological carbon pump through the analysis of biomass’s vertical movement in the water column, provide insights into predator-prey dynamics by offering the vertical arrangement of prey, and contribute to enhancing ecosystem models by providing information on diel vertical migration.”