Issue 2, May 2006

VR2 Workshop held at Catalina Island in November 2005

VR2 automated acoustic receiver technology and associated coded transmitters have significantly increased biologists' understanding of behaviour of marine organisms in the wild. In the five years the technology has been readily available, there has been a dramatic increase in use which has created both opportunities and challenges for all users.

Since VR2 receivers can be programmed to detect tags other than just those of the primary user, there lies tremendous potential for collaborative efforts among users to increase their areas of detection by sharing code numbers and reporting unknown codes to a registry of users. However, the number of distinct ID codes is somewhat limited (approximately 5,000 with normally used Code Maps) and many tags have a multi-year transmitting life. Therefore, avoiding duplicate ID codes in neighbouring areas is becoming more difficult and potentially impossible in the future unless the code space is expanded.

These issues prompted the organization of the VR2 Workshop at Catalina Island which gathered together a number of users from around the world with Vemco staff. During the Workshop, discussion and presentations focused on three broad areas:

1. Opportunities for collaboration and what initiatives Vemco and the community might take to maximize them.
2. User concerns with current limitations and planned or potential future directions of the technology to address these.
3. Issues related to database use, data management, handling and analysis along with potential new venues for handling and displaying data.

Major accomplishments of the Workshop included:

• Consensus on an approach (to start in 2006) towards a "standard" Map supporting approximately 70,000 IDs including 512 IDs for sensor tags (See related article on Code Maps in this Newsletter).
• First steps towards a voluntary User Registry which will help maximize data sharing and creation of a resource library of relevant documents, tutorial information, scripts and shareware for data analysis and management.

The full Workshop Proceedings are now available on the Vemco website and provide valuable insights into the technology and how it is used by various groups. (Download the Proceedings.)

Dale Webber and Doug Pincock represented Vemco at this event. The valuable customer feedback they received will have a strong influence on our decision making for future products. As well, we believe that many users were able to gain a better understanding of the technology and how to get the best results from it.

We plan to hold similar events in the future with the product focus adapted to key areas of our product line as identified by customers. Plans are being formulated to hold the next Workshop in conjunction with the Technologies in Fish and Fish Sciences Workshop to be held August 28th and 29th in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

Finally we would like to thank Chris Lowe of California State University, Long Beach and Michelle Heupel and Colin Simpfendorfer of the Mote Marine Laboratory for the tremendous job they did organizing this event.