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Marina Militare ItalianaUniversità degli Studi di PaviaCentro Interdisciplinare di Bioacustica e Ricerche Ambientali |
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COOPERATIVE RESEARCH PROJECTS WITH THE ITALIAN NAVYWithin the European Nature Conservation Year 1995, the Italian Navy set up a cooperative research program with Universities and other institutions to give logistic support and to apply its technologies to the study and protection of the marine environment. |
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Acoustic recordings of biological sources made by the Navy in 1995 were acquired, analyzed and included in the CIBRA's Cetacean Sound Library. All recordings containing sperm whale vocalizations were used to map locations where whales were heard; a few of them were of enough quality to be useful for further acoustic analyses and gave interesting new information, including several recordings of codas.
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In 1998 an agreement among the Italian Navy and the University
of Pavia was signed to facilitate the development of cooperative projects
and the sharing of data and methodologies. |
The experience gained in these projects was particularly valuable when the NATO Undersea Research Center based in La Spezia, Italy, set up the SOLMAR Joint Research Project. Now the Italian Navy is one of the most important partner of the SOLMAR Project and is among the very first navies that adopt a policy to protect marine mammals against military sonars and other potentially harmful activities.
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The
project included a research program on cetacean acoustics, mainly dealing
with the two larger species in the Mediterranean Sea, the fin whale Balaenoptera
physalus and the sperm whale Physeter macrocephalus, to unveil
and monitor their seasonal movements and behaviour and, possibly, to assess
population sizes. Target species for the first year of the project was
the sperm whale; a species quite rare in the Mediterranean for which acoustic
methods have proven to be relevant in revealing its presence underwater.
The main goal was collecting recordings made by different Navy's platforms,
such as surface vessels, submarines and sonobuoys. Particular emphasis
was put into tuning protocols for data interchange and into coordinating
efforts for the development of shared methodologies and instrumentation.
Training activities were also made to instruct the operators to pay attention
to biological sources and to coordinate their efforts in recording them
while performing their institutional patrolling activities. Along with
data collection by military platforms, research cruises with traditional
instruments such as stationary hydrophones and towed arrays of hydrophone
have been supported by the Navy. The instrumentation of the Interdisciplinary
Center for Bioacoustics, which includes a towed hydrophone array made
by Alenia, DAT recorders and a custom workstation for real-time sound
analysis, has been modified to be used on training sailing vessels provided
by the Navy and new data analysis tools were developed. 
The
project demonstrated that the acquisition of biological sounds and information
can be carried out side to side with the institutional patrolling activities
of the Navy. The results gained so far show that "Dual Uses"
of military technologies can be used to solve scientific problems, to
widen our awareness about the seasonal distribution of sperm whales in
the Mediterranean Sea, and to provide new valuable information to biologists.
The
IT Navy was among the first institutions being concerned with the issue
of underwater noise. 
