Major soundscape differences in the west coast of Scotland are reflected in acoustic indices

Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) is increasingly used to monitor marine soundscapes, which are often characterised using anthrophony (human-related sounds), biophony (biotic events) and geophony (abiotic events) categories. The soundscape is especially complex in shallow marine habitats, and has been shown to vary on small temporal-spatial scales 1 . Processing PAM data sets with high sample rates remains a challenge in signal extraction, efficiency of data processing and balancing the requirement of long-term data visualisation or statistical summaries with often short duration soundscape drivers such as delphinid clicks.
The study of all components of a soundscape, alongside individual sources or species, is vital in the
context of rapidly changing habitats and increasing evidence of the impact of anthrophony on marine ecosystems 2,3,4 . Soundscape Ecology considers an entire soundscape, allowing questions around the inter-relation between soundscape components and their spatial-temporal patterns to be considered5. Understanding and efficiently quantifying soundscapes which may differ over small regions is vital if marine management and protection is to utilise PAM data effectively.
.