A Citizen Science Noise Monitoring Program will be launched in mid-July. SDA volunteers, Chris Hurley and acoustic researcher Lauren Kuehne, will be spear-heading this initiative. The citizen science monitoring plan will include between 8 to 12 monitoring sites and is being developed with input from regional volunteers.
A summary of Kuehne’s research on the Olympic Peninsula was published in DNR’s publication The Learning Forest, entitled Tracking the Wild EA-18G: Growler Flights on the Olympic Peninsula. Her study demonstrated that it is feasible to track noise and activity of different aircraft on the Olympic Peninsula using audio monitoring. Importantly, it showed that 85 percent of aircraft noise on the Peninsula was military; only 8 percent and 7 percent were attributable to commercial and propeller aircraft, respectively. Her results documented when noise is experienced, allowing better evaluation of how the proposed increases in Growler training may play out, and what ecological impacts may warrant further investigation.