The database includes audiograms from wild-caught odontocetes, stranded and rehabilitating odontocetes, and odontocetes kept under human care. In association with developing an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard on methods for testing odontocete hearing, the database will:
- Help ensure consistency in marine mammal hearing assessments across regions, laboratories, and stranding networks.
- Increase the availability of audiometric information for odontocete species to resource managers, academics, and the public.
- Enable population-level variability in species’ hearing to be determined by providing a common repository for the long-term accumulation of audiometric data.
- Provide a resource for use in environmental stewardship efforts related to noise and marine mammals.
CEPAD allows audiometric data and metadata associated with audiogram collections to be queried and downloaded for reference and analysis. Robust filtering permits data to be delimited by sex, age, location, species, type of testing, etc. The selection of multiple individuals allows summary audiometric information, including means and standard deviations in hearing sensitivity, to be determined. Access to CEPAD will soon be made more broadly available through a Data Sharing Agreement. CEPAD is a collaborative development of the National Marine Mammal Foundation and NOAA Fisheries.
