About Hydra
Around the Pacific Northwest, researchers from a variety of federal and local agencies, universities, and tribes in aggregate are using several hundred hydrophones to conduct research studies on movement patterns of aquatic animals. Each research program is characterized by numerous tagged animals that move and a relatively limited number of acoustic receivers that are located to address a significant question for individual programs. Importantly, these tagged animals move over larger domains than individual receiver arrays.
These researchers have recognized the value of coordinating placement of hydrophones to improve their collective listening capability and ability to address emergent, larger-scale management questions. Researchers needed the ability to efficiently share detections of each others tag codes to enable the larger research collaboration.
Hydra was developed to facilitate data sharing and research coordination for these researchers. The researchers were happy with Hydra's service so they told their colleagues who are also doing acoustic telemetry about Hydra and they joined too. Currently Hydra extends from British Columbia to Southern California.