POST

The Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking Project

	SLOAN FOUNDATION
Founding Organizations of POST

The Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking Project was initiated to test if acoustic technology can be used in a large-scale and on-going way to pry open the black box that holds so much information about animal life in the ocean. POST has begun installing a permanent array of acoustic receivers on the ocean floor along the western continental shelf of North America. These receivers detect the movement of marine animals carrying acoustic tags surgically implanted for life in their body cavities. The tags provide a means of following the movements and survival of individual marine animals for periods of time ranging from months to decades.

• A video about POST (MOV Format)

The chief architect of POST is Dr. David Welch, who is also the founder of Kintama Research Corporation. POST is a nonprofit organization that is hosted by the Vancouver Aquarium and funded through the Census of Marine Life. The POST secretariat is responsible for education and outreach, operating the long-term tracking database, as well as coordinating among the developing regional POST arrays world-wide. Kintama Research Corporation is the primary contractor for POST and is responsible for the development of the technical methods and engineering standards necessary to deploy a reliable far-flung array of ocean sensors.

The POST array completed a two-year demonstration phase at the end of 2005, proving the technology and concepts involved. Acoustic tags were implanted into over 1000 salmon smolts, representing stocks from various release sites throughout southern British Columbia. The tags were successfully detected on the array which now spans much of the western continental shelf of North America and includes six main lines plus a number of short lines deployed at four river mouths. The array detection efficiency was 93 % in both years. Rates of in-river and ocean survival are now available for both years, allowing for inter-year and inter-stock comparisons.

As of 2006, we have now begun deploying the first lines of the permanent array, using equipment that can remain in the field for several years and that can be polled regularly for data upload (links to the array technology section here). Over the next three years, this array will continue to be built up based on user demand and consultation with the scientific community, with the goal of completing a continental-scale array, capable of yielding a complete census of all tagged animals migrating along the continental shelves, by 2010 (include a figure of the end-goal map somewhere).

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