Tethys 3.2 - Passive acoustic monitoring (bioacoustics) data management

Tethys acoustic metadata server version 3.2, used for archiving information related to passive acoustic monitoring.  See the Tethys web site for further details including release notes on the installation page as well as Management of acoustic metadata for bioacoustics (Roch et al., 2016) for the general philosophy of this project.  The software uses a client/server architecture, with the server providing an interface to the database and client interfaces designed to run in web browsers, MATLAB, R, and Python.  This open source software is largely compliant with proposed ANSI/ASA standards for managing acoustic metadata.  This release contains three zip archives:

• tethys_3_2_code.zip - contains client & server software.
• databases-metadata-demptydb.zip - contains an initialized and empty database.
• databases-demodb-demonstration_data.zip - contains a demonstration database with over 850 deployments, nearly half a million detections, and over 1200 animal tracks.

Download the code package and databases-metdata to start your own Tethys server.  Download databases-demodb if you wish to play with an existing database with over .5 million records before creating your own.  All zip archives should be extracted to the same directory, e.g., your home/Tethys.  Extractors such as 7Zip or WinRaR typically perform the extraction significantly faster than Windows built-in zip archive management.  Documentation/READ ME FIRST.pdf provides a roadmap of the documentation, with Documentation/Tethys.pdf being the primary manual.  Additional manuals are available for the clients as well as understanding the RESTful interface between the server and clients (interface is only needed for those writing custom programs to communicate with the server).

The server runs on Windows x64 and could be ported to other systems that support ODBC interfaces.  Most clients should run on many different operating systems; the MATLAB client requires one module to be compiled if running on other operating systems than Windows.

Tethys 3.2 includes support for PAMGuard 2.0.17 and later, PAMGuard records can be exported directly to Tethys.  Significant new functionality has been added to the R Programming Language client.  The MATLAB client has an improved environmental data interface that permits working with multiple ERDDAP servers.  Documentation is now availble from the web client with several new tutorial-style sections.  Other minor changes including improved error messages and corrections are throughout.  For programmers, Tethys now has the ability to provide XSLT processing on the server.  Tethys source code is hosted on bitbucket.

Development of Tethys has been made possible by The US National Oceanographic Partnership Program, The US Office of Naval Research, The US Navy Living Marine Resources Program, and the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.  We thank the numerous people who have contributed to developing the code base and documentation over the years:  Heidi Batchelor, Jeff Cavner, David Cardoso, Aayushi Dubey, Sean Herbert, Katie O'Laughlin, Ally Rice, and Daniel Westin.  We are grateful for the feedback of numerous scientists who have provided steering and guidance on this project, especially from the US NOAA National Marine Fisheries Centers and the US National Centers for Environmental Information.