​​Steering committee

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

​

​

 

Background

​

The field of study of bioacoustics and the application of Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) methods applied to aquatic mammals have grown worldwide. The most coordinated and sustained research efforts however, exist in the northern hemisphere, or in more developed nations. Advances in detection, classification, localization, density estimation, and behavioural studies of aquatic mammals using sound have been accomplished in North America and Europe as a consequence of dedicated workshops and meetings.

There has been a clear lack of opportunities for networking and meeting other researchers at a regional level, in order to promote collaborations within Latin America.

Between October and December 2015, we conducted an online survey sent out to the aquatic mammal community via the Marmam email list in order to get a sense of how many researchers were working on aquatic mammal bioacoustics in Latin America, and whether there was any interest from the community for a meeting that could bring us together.

Seventy-one researchers answered the survey, representing nearly 300 researchers, professionals, and students from 44 institutions working in the field.

​

​

Aims

 

- Bring together researchers, professionals, and graduate students working in bioacoustics to communicate their work, network and interact with other researchers, to provide opportunities for collaboration and discuss directions for a coordinated regional bioacoustics network within Latin America.

​

- Produce documents that identifies research groups, target species, methods, time and space scales of the current aquatic mammal bioacoustics research efforts in Latin America.

​

- Identify future directions for developing aquatic mammal bioacoustics at a regional level and for future LAMLA meetings.

​