BlackCeTrends project Dataset supporting the paper "Validation of the F-POD – a fully automated cetacean monitoring system".

BlackCeTrends - Large coverage initiative for acoustic survey of cetaceans in the Black Sea An international project “BlackCeTrends” has been launched, in which six institutions from all around the Black Sea: Mare Nostrum NGO (Romania), Green Balkans NGO (Bulgaria), UkrSCES & BioEcoLinks (Ukraine), Turkish Marine Research Foundation TUDAV (Turkey) and Ilia State University (Georgia), together with British acoustic device manufacturer Chelonia Ltd. with the objective of assessing the trends in Black Sea cetaceans using a passive acoustic monitoring method. The main activity of the project is collection of acoustic data to understand the presence of cetaceans, especially harbour porpoises, by deploying fully automated passive acoustic monitoring instruments of the new generation, F-PODs. F-PODs are provided for free for a permanent loan as long as they are in use by Chelonia Ltd. They are designed specifically to detect and record the high-frequency sounds of dolphins and porpoises, and they were newly developed from C-PODs, which have been extensively used in the North and Baltic Seas. The collected data are downloaded periodically, approximately every 1-4 months, and the results are processed by specialized software. Four or five devices have been provided to each of the partners, of which nine are already in place, in the western part of the Black Sea (Figure 1) and all the others will be deployed in the near future