Acoustic Telemetry in Aquatic Ecosystems

Acoustic telemetry has emerged as a cornerstone method for tracking and studying the movements, behaviour and habitat use of fishes and other aquatic organisms across freshwater, estuarine and marine environments. By implanting or attaching acoustic transmitters to individual animals and deploying arrays of underwater receivers, researchers can resolve spatio‐temporal patterns ranging from fine‐scale daily movements to basin‐wide migrations. Technological advances—such as miniaturisation of tags, integration of environmental sensors (e.g. depth, temperature) and improvements in battery life—have extended applications to smaller species and early life stages. Concurrent developments in array design, data management and analytical frameworks enable real-time monitoring, standardised meta-analyses and synthesis across local and continental scales. This combination of hardware and software innovations has transformed our understanding of predator–prey interactions, animal responses to habitat modification (including wind‐farm infrastructure), connectivity among protected areas and the effects of environmental change. The method’s growing global network has practical applications in fisheries management, conservation planning, ecosystem‐based monitoring and policy development.

Research from Nature Portfolio

A foundational methodological advance introduced a unified state-space positioning solver that jointly fits time-of-arrival data and a movement model, avoiding the conventional sequential filtering approach. This novel framework leverages all available detections in a single maximum-likelihood analysis, yielding more accurate and consistent three-dimensional positions while providing transparent error metrics. Rigorous simulation testing and field trials demonstrated clear performance gains over proprietary software, and the open-source nature of the tool fosters adaptation for bespoke study requirements and ongoing methodological refinement.

Acoustic Telemetry in Aquatic Ecosystems publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in acoustic telemetry in aquatic ecosystems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Acoustic telemetry: A technique in which underwater transmitters emit coded sound pulses that are detected by stationary or mobile receiver units to monitor the location and movements of tagged animals.

Acoustic transmitter (tag): A miniature electronic device attached to or implanted in an aquatic animal that emits uniquely coded acoustic signals at set intervals.

Receiver array: A network of hydrophone units deployed in a study area to detect and record signals from acoustic tags, enabling triangulation of animal positions.

State-space model: A statistical framework that combines observational data (e.g. time-of-arrival of signals) with a movement process model to estimate true animal trajectories and quantify uncertainty.

References

1. The role of acoustic telemetry to assess the effects of offshore wind infrastructure on fish behaviour, populations and predation. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (2025).
2. Positioning of aquatic animals based on time-of-arrival and random walk models using YAPS (Yet Another Positioning Solver). Scientific Reports (2017).
3. TrackdAT, an acoustic telemetry metadata dataset to support aquatic animal tracking research. Scientific Data (2024).
4. Acoustic and archival technologies join forces: A combination tag. Methods in Ecology and Evolution (2023).
5. Global trends in aquatic animal tracking with acoustic telemetry. Trends in Ecology & Evolution (2021).
6. Fish with Chips: Tracking Reef Fish Movements to Evaluate Size and Connectivity of Caribbean Marine Protected Areas. PLOS ONE (2014).