What can you do with twenty years of water column sonar data? Plenty!

Collection of multifrequency fisheries acoustic data began at the NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) in 1998. Over the past 20 + years, data have been collected on the NOAA fisheries survey vessels as well as commercial vessels during numerous surveys and research cruises. Many lessons in cooperation, initiative, persistence, and compromise have been learned, resulting in data sets with plenty of potential. Some of these data have been rejected and then resuscitated for stock assessments, used to estimate biomass of undersampled biota, and used to study catchability of commercial species. Until recently, data were limited to those at the NEFSC with sufficient expertise and access to the data—i.e., me, which has restricted application of the data. But now the data are searchable and available to the world via NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI). The evolution of acoustic technology and software from costly and proprietary to inexpensive and open-source has expanded the utility of these, and other long-term, data sets to the broader scientific community. An overarching goal has been to collect consistently high-quality data, yet only through incorporating innovation can long-term data collection survive in a dynamic environment and ever-changing scientific landscape.