Acoustic signals monitoring in shallow marine waters: technological progress for scientific data acquisition

Acoustic monitoring can improve the knowledge of marine environment, because sounds can be an indicator of background noise and health status of biological habitat [? ]. Acoustic devices find applications in many different research and monitoring activities nowadays carried out in shallow marine waters. This paper introduces a reconfigurable measurement instrument based on a custom patented board with an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array), four parallel acquisition chains with charge amplifier, variable gain, selectable high-pass filter and Analog to Digital converter up to 1.33 MS/s with a 16 bit sample resolution. Because of the large amount of data to be recorded and stored and the different acoustic frequencies, the possibility of changing settings and configuration via software allows the application of acoustic recordings to a wide range of marine researches.