Tethys Overview

Tethys Interface

Overview

Tethys mosaic

PAMGuard is compatible with Tethys 3.1 or later available for download from Zenodo.

Tethys is a freely available open source temporal-spatial database for metadata related to acoustic recordings. The database is intended to house the metadata from marine mammal detection and localization studies, allowing the user to perform meta analyses or to aggregate data from many experimental efforts based on a common attribute. This resulting database can then be queried based on time, space, or any desired attribute and the results can be integrated with external datasets such as NASA’s Ocean Color, lunar illumination, etc. in a consistent manner. While Tethys is designed primarily for acoustic metadata from marine mammals, the design is general enough to permit use in other areas as well.

The Tethys database is not a replacement for the existing PAMGuard Database. Where the PAMGuard database only contains data from a single instrument or cruise, the Tethys database contains data from many cruises and projects and can be used to hold a summary of all data from a lab or organisation. PAMGuard’s Tethys module provides an interface for exporting detailed or summary information about acoustic detections to the Tethys database.

Before using the module in PAMGuard, you should install the Tethys Server. While clients that communicate with Tethys can run on a variety of computer operating systems, there are a small number of dependencies on Microsoft technologies that require the server to be installed on a Microsoft Windows machine. Instructions for installing the Tethys Server can be found here.

Module help:

  1. The Tethys module (start here)
  2. The Connecting to Tethys
  3. The Instrument calibrations
  4. The Instrument deployments
  5. The Detections & Localizations
  6. Guide to specifying species names