The open-source "Echostack" for flexible and scalable echosounder data processing

Water column sonar data collected by echosounders are essential for fisheries and marine ecosystem research, enabling the detection, classification, and quantification of fish and zooplankton from many different ocean observing platforms. However, the broad usage of these data has been hindered by the lack of modular software tools that allow flexible composition of data processing workflows that incorporate powerful analytical tools in the scientific Python ecosystem.

We address this gap by developing Echostack, a suite of open-source Python software packages that leverage existing distributed computing and cloud-interfacing libraries to support intuitive and scalable data access, processing, and interpretation. These tools can be used individually or orchestrated together, which we demonstrate in example use cases for a fisheries acoustic-trawl survey.

Below is a summary of the Echostack packages:

For more information, check out the code repositories below:

• Echopype
  • Check out the our Echopype paper in the ICES Journal of Marine Science
• Echopop
  • Learn more on the Echopop project page
• Echoshader
• Echoregions
• Echodataflow

These packages are accompanied by a set of Echolevels that categorize data products at different workflow stages to enhance data understanding and provenance tracking.

Check out Wu-Jung’s talk at SciPy 2024 and the associated paper in the proceedings!

Funding:

• NOAA Fisheries
• NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research FY2021 grants