Large scale passive acoustic data management.

Passive acoustic recording systems can generate large amounts of data, especially given the increasing capability of inexpensive flash memory. DSGLab, an open‐source database and data analysis system implemented with MATLAB and a portal to MYSQL, was created to handle large amounts of raw data collected by dozens of acoustic recorders over periods up to a year. Each recorded data file is tagged with header information including latitude, longitude, depth or altitude, timestamp, sample rate, and calibration, among other metadata variables, and uploaded to the database. This information allows all files in the database to be queried based on, for example, location (latitude, longitude, depth) and time (date, hour). Then the data analysis section processes the desired selection of files according to a user‐specified signal processing chain, which does not require prior programming knowledge, and returns the results to a database and to individual files. The signal processing results can then be quickly brows...