Tethys is a freely available open source temporal-spatial database for metadata related to acoustic recordings. The database is intended to house the metadata from passive acoustic monitoring detection and localization studies, allowing the user to perform meta analyses or to aggregate data from many experimental efforts based on a common attribute. This resulting database can then be queried based on time, space, or any desired attribute and the results can be integrated with external datasets such as NASA’s Ocean Color, lunar illumination, etc. in a consistent manner. While Tethys is designed primarily for acoustic metadata from marine mammals, our team has worked with terrestrial passive acoustic monitoring studies as well and the schemata are designed to be general enough to support terrestrial work as well.
PAMGuard, a well known software package for analyzing passive acoustic data, supports data export to Tethys. PAMGuard is not designed for integrating multiple studies, and this capability allows one to easily incorporate results of PAM studies into the Tethys database. See the Tethys tutorial on PAMGuard’s tutorial page for details on how to export data from PAMGuard to Tethys. (Other methods exist for people who do not use PAMGuard; data can be imported from spreadsheets, relational databases, or generated by software using the Tethys’s Nilus library.)
Tethys provides a scientific workbench to the practitioner. Thrrough our web client and data explorer clients, we provide point and click interfaces to explore your data. For more detailed analysis, Tethys provides programming interfaces that practitioners use to conduct their analysis. Currently, Tethys supports Matlab, Java, Python, and the R programming language. These interfaces allow practitioners to access the metadata associated with a specific laboratory or project. Additionally, the tools provide access to environmental data based on spatial location and selected temporal boundaries from a wide variety of online sources. For a broader introduction, watch some of the short talks on the tutorials page.
Currently, the server software runs on 64-bit Windows only; porting to other platforms that support Microsoft’s open database connectivity protocol should be possible. Client software runs on platform-independent languages and should be executable on most platforms.
The schemata engineered for the Tethys project started in 2011 with a large team from NOAA, Scripps Insitution of Oceanography, and San Diego State University. It served as a starting point for the development of standard ASA/ANSI S3/SC1.7-2026 which specifies information that should be retained for passive acoustic monitoring. The standards working group brought in additional expertise from industry, government, and academia. The Tethys schemata grew as changes were proposed by the working group is today largely compliant with the standard. See the standards page for further details on the data standards including where to purchase the standard and open access information that helps with understanding the standard and how it is used.
Development of the Tethys Metadata project is sponsored by:
The following organizations have participated in the development of Tethys
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