SEEA EA is an integrated statistical framework for organizing biophysical data, measuring ecosystem services and tracking changes in ecosystem extent and condition. Within the framework, ecosystem assets are contiguous, mappable areas of a specific ecosystem type, and the area in which an account is compiled defines which assets are included. Extent and condition together describe an ecosystem asset’s capacity to provide services. The pilot did not estimate the monetary value of those services; instead, it established a baseline for accounts covering the extent and condition of Finnish marine habitats.

The researchers calculated extents for 15 MSFD benthic broad habitat types. These categories span deep circalittoral, shallow circalittoral and infralittoral zones and include hard, coarse, sandy, muddy and mixed substrates. They also used six Finnish marine habitat types recognized under Annex I of the Habitats Directive: Boreal Baltic narrow inlets, coastal lagoons, estuaries, large shallow inlets and bays, sandbanks and reefs. The third classification comprised 19 nationally assessed threatened habitat types based on the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems criteria. These Red List habitats are defined by dominant biota, including habitat-forming algae, seagrasses and invertebrates, and are more detailed than the MSFD and Habitats Directive classes.

MSFD and Habitats Directive habitats were mapped as polygons, and their areas were calculated in hectares. For the 19 Red List habitats, the study used predicted occurrence probabilities from a previously published species-distribution modelling approach based on biological surveys. Predictions were converted to binary maps at a 20-by-20-metre resolution using a threshold selected to maximize sensitivity and specificity. Because several habitat types can occur within the same 400-square-metre grid cell, the researchers reported Red List habitat areas as “extent units,” defined as the number of grid cells in which a habitat was predicted to occur. These units can overlap and do not cover the entire accounting area, so they are not directly comparable with the hectare-based MSFD and Habitats Directive totals.

Ecosystem condition was derived from Finland’s 2021 WFD status assessment, which primarily uses biological indicators supplemented by physico-chemical and hydrological-morphological measures. Finland’s marine area is divided into 276 WFD areas, with ecological status classified as high, good, moderate, poor or bad. The assessment draws mainly on monitoring data from 2012–2017, with some data from 2018. Habitat condition was assigned by calculating the overlap between each habitat and the relevant WFD area. Condition could not be evaluated for habitats extending into the exclusive economic zone, places where coastlines did not align fully with WFD areas, or areas lacking biological or physico-chemical data; only their extents were reported for those areas.

Shallow, circalittoral, mixed and muddy substrate habitats had the greatest combined MSFD extent. The total area represented by MSFD habitats was approximately ten times the area represented by Habitats Directive habitats. The Red List estimates could not be compared directly with those hectare totals. The filamentous annual algae habitat was predicted to occur in more than 12 million extent units, while the red algae habitat was predicted to occur in more than 9.5 million extent units.

A large portion of the assessed habitats was in poor condition regardless of the classification used. Estuaries in the inner archipelago and shallow nearshore habitats, including lagoons and benthic habitats characterised by Hippuris, were in poor condition. Habitats in deeper and more exposed areas, including reefs and benthic habitats characterised by red algae, were in better condition. Overall, MSFD habitats were generally in moderate condition apart from shallow and circalittoral muddy areas. The authors associated the poor condition of nearshore habitats with the eutrophication status of Finland’s coastal waters. Agriculture was identified as the primary source of nutrient loading in most of Finland, while natural runoff and forestry dominated in the Bothnian Bay.

The pilot also identified structural limitations in applying SEEA EA to marine environments. The framework requires ecosystem assets to be geographically and conceptually exhaustive and exclusive, but marine habitats often occur in patchy, overlapping distributions. Most habitat maps also rely on modelling because direct seabed mapping is expensive. Red List extent units capture fine-scale and irregular habitat patterns more closely than mutually exclusive area classes, but overlapping units can create double-counting risks, while unrepresented areas leave gaps that may underestimate ecosystem services. Habitats Directive classes cover only part of Finland’s marine ecosystems and are primarily based on morphological or geological characteristics, making them poor surrogates for marine biodiversity. Only a small portion of Finnish marine habitats is compatible with the coarser IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology.

Further limitations concern geographic coverage, indicators and comparability. The WFD concentrates mainly on coastal waters and does not assess offshore areas, while Finland’s six MSFD reporting areas are less detailed than its 276 WFD areas. The six-year WFD reporting cycle may also be slow relative to changes in rapidly warming surface waters, although some variables, including chlorophyll a measured through Earth observation, can support annual assessment. The study covered only 19 Red List habitats, omitted fauna-based habitats for which biomass data are limited, and excluded shoreline reed habitats. It concentrated on eutrophication-related condition, although coastal land use and offshore industrial activities also exert pressure on marine ecosystems. The Finnish pilot therefore provides a detailed baseline where suitable data exist, but its classifications and condition indicators do not yet form a complete or fully comparable marine account.

Subject of Research: Pilot marine ecosystem extent and condition accounts for Finnish marine habitats using EU policy classifications and WFD indicators

Article Title: Marine ecosystem extent and condition pilot accounts for Finland

Article References: Virtanen, E., Forsblom, L., Saikkonen, L., Jernberg, S., Viitasalo, M., & Kulmala, S. (2024). Marine ecosystem extent and condition pilot accounts for Finland. One Ecosystem, 9, Article e138839. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.9.e138839

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/oneeco.9.e138839

Keywords: marine ecosystem accounting, SEEA EA, Finland, ecosystem extent, ecosystem condition, Marine Strategy Framework Directive, Water Framework Directive, Habitats Directive, IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, marine habitats, Marine, ecosystem

The three protected areas belong to the European NATURA 2000 network and were designated to achieve Good Environmental Status under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. Yet assessments have shown that these sites consistently fail to meet that status, largely because of the sheer volume of human activity taking place within them. Mobile bottom-contact fishing — gears such as beam trawls that penetrate the sediment to depths of two centimetres or more — is among the most widespread of these pressures. More than 60 percent of the southern North Sea seafloor has been trawled at least once per year, and although fishing effort has generally declined since 2000, it remains concentrated in the shallower eastern and south-eastern parts of the basin.

To disentangle the effects of fishing from those of natural environmental drivers, the team sampled along gradients of decreasing fishing intensity within each protected area. They collected infauna samples with a 0.1 square metre van Veen grab at stations spaced along transects, sieving the sediment over one millimetre mesh and identifying every retained organism to the lowest possible taxonomic level. In parallel, they analysed sediment composition — mud, sand, gravel, and shell contents — and recorded water depth at each station. Fishing intensity data came from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, derived from vessel monitoring system and logbook records at a resolution of one square nautical mile, a scale fine enough to resolve the small focus areas.

The three sites proved strikingly different in their physical character. Borkum Reef Ground, the smallest at 625 square kilometres, sits roughly 40 kilometres from the East Frisian coast and features a median sand content of 98 percent, with small amounts of gravel found nowhere else in the study. Dogger Bank, a shallow sandbank in the central North Sea where northern and southern North Sea species meet, also showed 98 percent median sand but with increasing mud content at greater depths. Sylt Outer Reef, the largest site at 5,603 square kilometres, was the most heterogeneous, with median sand content of just 78 percent, the highest mud content at around 17 percent, and the richest shell content at 6 percent. Median depths ranged from about 30 metres at Borkum Reef Ground to 43 metres at the other two sites.

Fishing intensity varied dramatically across the three areas. Borkum Reef Ground recorded the lowest median intensity, with the sediment trawled roughly once per period in the subsurface layer. Dogger Bank recorded the highest, at a median value of 16, meaning parts of the bank were penetrated 16 times over the aggregated period. Sylt Outer Reef showed intermediate values with clear gradients, increasing from west to east in the eastern German Bight and from north to south along the western transects. These gradients were the analytical backbone of the study, allowing the researchers to test whether communities changed predictably as fishing pressure declined.

In total, the team identified 215 infauna taxa across the three focus areas. Only about a quarter of these — 25.58 percent — occurred in all three areas, exemplified by the bivalve Abra alba, the polychaete Lagis koreni, and the amphipod Tryphosa nana. Nearly half — 47.91 percent — were found in just one area: the amphipod Harpinia antennaria appeared only at Sylt Outer Reef, the bivalve Spisula elliptica only at Borkum Reef Ground, and the polychaete Clymenura lankesteri only at Dogger Bank. Multivariate analyses confirmed that the communities of the three sites were significantly different, separating at a 35 percent similarity level with an ANOSIM statistic of 0.98.

Within each site, the analyses revealed two significantly distinct communities. At Borkum Reef Ground, one community was characterised by high abundances of the lancelet Branchiostoma lanceolatum and the polychaete Lanice conchilega, while the other was dominated by the polychaete Spiophanes bombyx and juvenile echinoids. At Dogger Bank, one community featured the brittlestar Amphiura filiformis alongside Spiophanes bombyx and Bathyporeia amphipods, while the other was marked by the small echinoid Echinocyamus pusillus. At Sylt Outer Reef, one community was defined by the bivalves Nucula nitidosa and Thyasira flexuosa, the other by the bivalve Varicorbula gibba and the gastropod Turritellinella tricarinata. Notably, the researchers also recorded high abundances of the non-native polychaete Loimia ramzega at Borkum Reef Ground, a novel observation for this region.

The statistical disentangling of drivers produced the study’s most consequential result. Distance-based linear models showed that sediment composition — sand, mud, gravel, and shell contents — correlated significantly with community structure at all three sites, but with strikingly different explanatory power. At Borkum Reef Ground, cumulative sediment fractions accounted for 88.1 percent of community variation, reflecting the site’s strong physical heterogeneity. At Dogger Bank the figure was 34.68 percent, and at Sylt Outer Reef just 20.38 percent. Fishing intensity, by contrast, explained 9 percent of variation at Borkum Reef Ground — where it was not statistically significant — but 16 percent at Dogger Bank and 12.7 percent at Sylt Outer Reef, both highly significant. Distance-based redundancy analysis confirmed that stations with high fishing intensity plotted close to the fishing vector, which correlated strongly with the first ordination axis at both Dogger Bank and Sylt Outer Reef.

Why would fishing effects emerge clearly at two sites but not at the third? The researchers point to the interplay between natural and anthropogenic disturbance. Benthic communities exposed to high natural disturbance from currents, waves, and storms develop species adapted to that variability, and their response to trawling becomes smaller or undetectable. Borkum Reef Ground, with its dynamic reef and sandbank structures, may fall into this category. The team also noted the prevalence of opportunistic, small-bodied, r-strategic species in the communities at Dogger Bank and Sylt Outer Reef — a classic signature of continuous disturbance that favours short-lived organisms over longer-living ones. Decades of trawling have already shifted North Sea species composition in this direction, exemplified by the historical loss of extensive bivalve patches of Spisula subtruncata and Mactra stultorum from the north-eastern and central Dogger Bank.

The bans now in force transform this baseline into a reference point for recovery. Parts of Sylt Outer Reef and Borkum Reef Ground have been closed to commercial and scientific mobile bottom-contact fishing since March 2023, and parts of Dogger Bank since November 2025. Recovery has already been documented for infauna communities in a protected area in the Kattegat and for epifauna communities at Sylt Outer Reef, suggesting the German sites may follow suit. The German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation will carry out long-term monitoring over years to decades, indispensable for tracking change and assessing responses across human activities. The researchers caution that shipping, pelagic fishing, and pollution will continue within the protected areas and may hinder conservation measures. Still, with the baseline now established, scientists can finally measure whether the seabed communities of the German North Sea — after decades of trawling — can rebuild toward the Good Environmental Status their designation promised.

Subject of Research: Marine Conservation

Article Title: Effects of natural environmental drivers and different mobile bottom-contact fishing intensity on infauna communities in NATURA 2000 sites in the German Exclusive Economic Zone of the North Sea

Article References: Ohde, R., & Kröncke, I. (2026). Effects of natural environmental drivers and different mobile bottom-contact fishing intensity on infauna communities in NATURA 2000 sites in the German Exclusive Economic Zone of the North Sea. Nature Conservation, 66, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.3897/natureconservation.66.193151

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/natureconservation.66.193151

Keywords: marine biology, North Sea, bottom trawling, marine protected areas, NATURA 2000, benthic ecology, conservation, Effects, natural, environmental, drivers, different

The research addresses a conspicuous gap in European environmental law. The European Union’s Marine Strategy Framework Directive, introduced in 2008 to protect marine ecosystems and biodiversity, was intended to cover a broad suite of human pressures on the sea, and light pollution was nominally among them. In practice, however, no defined criteria for Good Environmental Status with respect to ALAN have ever been established, which means member states have had no operational way to measure, monitor or manage the problem. Without such criteria, light pollution has remained what the study’s authors describe as a hidden environmental threat, one that is acknowledged in principle but ignored in regulatory terms. The new methodology is designed to close that gap by providing a scientifically grounded, operational and adaptable framework that can be applied with existing knowledge and tools.

Technically, the framework draws on an approach already developed for underwater noise, another form of marine pollution that is extensively covered in existing Marine Strategy Framework Directive guidance. The research team, working as part of the AquaPLAN project, developed separate risk scoring criteria for the water column and for the seabed, recognising that light behaves differently as it travels through clear versus turbid water and that different habitats and organisms are exposed at different depths. The scoring system takes into account the light pollution being emitted by coastal towns and cities, the optical clarity of the seawater in particular locations, and how easily light can penetrate downward through the water column. Where water is clear, artificial light from shore can reach considerably deeper and affect a larger volume of habitat; where it is turbid, penetration is reduced but scattering can still illuminate surface waters.

To produce the risk maps, the team combined these criteria with existing datasets, most notably the 2021 Global Atlas of Artificial Light at Night Under the Sea, which integrates satellite observations of nighttime lights with models of how that light propagates underwater. Each regional sea was then scored according to the percentage of its area exposed to nil, low, medium or high risk of harm. The result is a ranked league table of European sea regions ordered from highest to lowest exposure risk. The Adriatic Sea tops the list, followed by the Baltic Sea and the western Mediterranean Sea, with the Greater North Sea, the Aegean-Levantine Sea, the Ionian and Central Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov also ranking among the more exposed waters. At the opposite end of the scale sit Macaronesia, a region encompassing the Canary Islands, the Azores, Madeira and Cape Verde, along with the Barents Sea, the Iceland Sea, the Norwegian Sea and the White Sea.

The pattern that emerges is geometric as much as demographic. Enclosed regions bordered by land on several sides accumulate light from multiple densely populated coastlines simultaneously, and because the water cannot disperse or dilute the illumination the way open ocean can, the exposure risk compounds. The Adriatic, wedged between the Italian peninsula and the Balkans and fringed by major tourist destinations, exemplifies the problem. The Baltic, with its low-lying, heavily developed catchment and relatively shallow, partially enclosed basin, shows a similar signature. The western Mediterranean combines intense coastal urbanisation with some of the clearest water in Europe, allowing shore-based light to penetrate further into the water column than it would in murkier northern seas.

For the United Kingdom, the news is comparatively reassuring. The Greater North Sea and the Celtic Seas are largely characterised as being of medium to low risk, reflecting the moderating effect of open connections to the Atlantic and the relatively diffuse distribution of coastal light sources. Yet the assessment also flagged a distinctly industrial contributor: the North Sea’s oil and gas fields, and the infrastructure associated with them, add significant levels of light pollution to what would otherwise be an open ocean setting. Offshore platforms, flares and floodlit installations create islands of artificial brightness far from any coastline, illuminating waters that would naturally experience only moonlight and starlight. This finding underscores that marine light pollution is not solely a coastal phenomenon driven by tourism and urbanisation.

The scientific case for concern has been building for more than a decade. Dr Thomas Davies, Associate Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of Plymouth, led the first ever study into the effects of light pollution on the marine environment in 2014 and is the lead author of the new research. He argues that the accumulated evidence now justifies regulatory action. Over many years, he notes, research has repeatedly shown that light pollution is significantly impacting many important coastal species, yet it remains largely absent from global policy. The Marine Strategy Framework Directive was supposed to include measures linked to light pollution, but that never fully materialised, with the standing argument being that the evidence base was insufficient to support detailed legislation. Davies contends that this argument no longer holds, and that the study, together with the wider body of work since 2014, provides clear evidence of risk and harm that urgently needs to be translated into meaningful action.

Senior author Professor Tim Smyth, Director of Science at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, emphasises that defining and quantifying Good Environmental Status requires more than measurement alone. It depends, he says, on combining global observations and mapping with expert scientific judgement about what a healthy ocean should look like. The 2021 Global Atlas of Artificial Light at Night Under the Sea, together with the extensive evidence generated over the past decade, has made it possible to assess this emerging pressure at a global scale. Smyth frames ALAN alongside other under-regulated stressors such as underwater noise, arguing that together they help build a more complete picture of cumulative human impacts on the ocean and provide the evidence base for effective action ranging from global policy down to local management decisions.

The study was written by scientists from the University of Plymouth, the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, the University of Pisa, the Genoa Marine Centre and the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, many of whom are also members of the Global Ocean Artificial Light at Night Network, known as GOALANN. The network was launched by Dr Davies and Professor Smyth at the United Nations Ocean Decade Conference in April 2024 and was later endorsed by the UN as one of its Ocean Decade Actions. Professor Elena Maggi, Professor in Ecology at the University of Pisa and AquaPLAN Project Coordinator, describes the central challenge as translating the substantial evidence that artificial light at night affects marine organisms and ecological processes into approaches that identify where ecosystems are most at risk, bringing together ecological knowledge and monitoring to provide a stronger basis for assessment and mitigation.

The authors also point to practical remedies, particularly for the tourist hotspots that dominate the list of most impacted regions. Authorities in those areas could explore meaningful changes to lighting infrastructure, including shielding fixtures to direct light downward, dimming or switching to part-night lighting schemes, and manipulating the wavelength composition of coastal lighting to reduce how far it penetrates into the sea, since blue-rich white light travels furthest through clear water. They further suggest designating dark spaces on and around islands, offering visitors an alternative experience to seasides ringed by artificial illumination. The researchers hope the methodology can be applied globally, and with the Marine Strategy Framework Directive currently under review, they argue the moment is ripe for light pollution to finally be written into European marine law with the same seriousness as noise, nutrients and chemical contaminants.

Subject of Research: A risk assessment framework for artificial light at night pollution in European marine waters

Article Title: Study highlights the European waters at greatest risk of harmful light pollution

Article References: Study highlights the European waters at greatest risk of harmful light pollution. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: light pollution, artificial light at night, marine conservation, Adriatic Sea, Baltic Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Marine Strategy Framework Directive, Good Environmental Status, AquaPLAN, water clarity, coastal ecosystems, University of Plymouth

The scientific and legal momentum behind tools like TUNE stems largely from the European Union’s Marine Strategy Framework Directive, the landmark 2008 legislation that obliges member states to achieve Good Environmental Status in their marine waters. Under the Directive’s Descriptor 11, which covers the introduction of energy, including underwater sound, two distinct criteria apply. The first addresses low- and mid-frequency impulsive sounds, such as the hammering of pile drivers during offshore construction, while the second targets continuous low-frequency noise, dominated overwhelmingly by commercial shipping. Shipping noise is the most pervasive form of underwater noise pollution and dominates ambient sound levels below one kilohertz across much of the world’s oceans. Criterion D11C2 specifically requires monitoring programs to report sound pressure levels within decidecade frequency bands centered at 63 and 125 hertz, two narrow slices of the acoustic spectrum that serve as proxies for overall shipping-related noise exposure.

Meeting that regulatory requirement sounds straightforward, but in practice it has been anything but. Reliable estimation of these acoustic quantities depends on robust and reproducible signal processing workflows, and the software landscape has long been fragmented. Raven Pro, a mainstay of bioacoustics research, offers limited flexibility in calibration and requires a commercial license. MATLAB-based tools such as CHORUS provide advanced processing capabilities but are not distributed as freely available standalone applications. The open-source MANTA package has improved accessibility and standardization for long-term ocean soundscape analysis, but it produces outputs in hybrid millidecade bands rather than the decidecade bands adopted for Marine Strategy Framework Directive reporting. Many other packages remain proprietary or closed-source, preventing users from inspecting and verifying the algorithms that ultimately feed into official environmental assessments. TUNE was engineered to close this gap by combining calibration accuracy, usability and regulatory compliance in a single freely available package distributed under the GNU General Public License.

At its core, TUNE processes calibrated acoustic recordings in wav format and computes a suite of standard underwater noise metrics. These include broadband sound pressure level, decidecade sound pressure level, zero-to-peak sound pressure level and power spectral density estimates. The software embraces recent international standardization: it uses the term decidecade in place of one-third octave band, following the 2025 update of the relevant ISO standard, which considers the two metrics approximately equivalent, and it adopts the sound pressure symbol conventions of ISO 18405:2017 for the definitions and equations of all four metrics. Processing is carried out over user-defined time intervals called snapshots, a concept aligned with the temporal observation windows introduced in recent ISO documents. Each recording can be segmented into consecutive, skipped or overlapping snapshots, allowing fully time-resolved estimates of how noise levels rise and fall, for example as a vessel approaches and then recedes from a monitoring station.

A distinguishing technical feature of TUNE is its support for frequency-dependent calibration. Hydrophones, the underwater microphones that record ocean sound, do not respond uniformly across frequencies, and their sensitivity can vary substantially across the acoustic spectrum. Many existing tools accept only a single calibration factor, which introduces errors when the hydrophone response is uneven. TUNE instead accepts a two-column text file containing frequency values and corresponding hydrophone sensitivity, expressed either as voltage sensitivity in decibels relative to one volt per micropascal or as an equivalent calibration factor in pascals per volt, with a minimum of three frequency points required. Spectral estimates are corrected bin by bin using this sensitivity curve, improving the accuracy of the resulting sound pressure levels. The software also allows optional high-pass, low-pass or band-pass digital filtering before analysis, with filters designed to fixed passband ripple and stopband attenuation specifications, and it supports flexible FFT parameters including window type, overlap and transform length.

Internally, the software follows a modular architecture organized into five stages: user input, data import, calibration, signal processing and output generation. A single-window graphical user interface lets users configure directories, calibration files, time ranges, spectrogram settings and filtering options, and the entire parameter set can be saved and reloaded as a setup file to guarantee reproducibility across monitoring campaigns. Processing proceeds through three nested loops at the file, channel and snapshot levels, with multi-channel recordings handled channel by channel. For each snapshot, the software computes a series of Fast Fourier Transforms over signal subsegments and averages them into a single representative spectrum, then corrects that spectrum against the calibration curve. Decidecade integration is performed using the nearest available FFT bins rather than exact theoretical band edges, a pragmatic approximation that benchmarking described in the paper’s supplementary materials shows produces negligible discrepancies for standard monitoring applications, while dramatically accelerating computation. One creative addition is the option to overlay Knudsen curves for sea states zero through six, letting analysts compare measured ambient noise against classic empirical predictions of wind-driven sea-state noise.

To demonstrate the tool, the researchers analyzed a real recording of a ship passing through a harbor, captured with a Teledyne Reson TC4040 hydrophone and VP1000 preamplifier feeding a Tascam DR-100 recorder at 96 kilohertz sampling with 24-bit resolution. The ten-minute recording was processed in ten-second snapshots using 131072-point FFTs with a Hann window and fifty percent overlap, and the entire computation completed in just two minutes and thirty-five seconds. The results were vivid: mean sound pressure levels in the 63 and 125 hertz decidecade bands reached 111 and 117 decibels respectively, the mean broadband level was 123 decibels, and the maximum zero-to-peak level hit 156 decibels at 256 seconds into the recording, precisely the closest point of approach of the vessel. All four metrics rose clearly during the first half of the recording, matching the ship passage documented in the campaign logs, and every output was delivered both as figures and as numerical text files ready for statistical aggregation across recordings, sites and seasons.

The impact of the software is already visible in practice. By providing a consistent, transparent and reproducible framework for acoustic data processing, TUNE directly addresses a long-standing problem: differences in signal processing workflows can produce substantial discrepancies in reported sound pressure levels, undermining the comparability of environmental assessments across institutions and countries. Perhaps most significantly, the tool has been adopted by multiple Regional Environmental Protection Agencies in Italy, establishing a shared national framework for underwater noise monitoring and overcoming methodological fragmentation among regional programs. This software-driven harmonization improves the consistency of reported indicators, increases transparency in reporting and supports the coordinated implementation of national monitoring obligations under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. Because TUNE can process long-term acoustic datasets and generate decidecade-band time series, it also supports the estimation of baseline conditions, trend analysis and threshold exceedance assessments in line with recent European Commission guidance on threshold values.

The developers see TUNE as a foundation rather than a finished product. Future versions will extend the range of computed metrics to include the Sound Exposure Level, which would allow the software to cover the Directive’s impulsive-sound criterion in addition to continuous noise, along with greater flexibility in temporal analysis. Beyond European regulatory monitoring, the authors note that the tool’s applicability extends to a broad range of marine and freshwater acoustic studies, from low-noise calibration sites to research linking low-frequency noise shifts to changes in fin whale song. In a field where proprietary licenses and closed algorithms have often stood between environmental agencies and their legal obligations, TUNE represents a quietly radical proposition: that the measurement of a pollutant threatening ocean life should be accurate, transparent and free for anyone who needs it.

Subject of Research: A free standalone software tool for standardized evaluation of underwater noise pollution under the Marine Strategy Framework Directive

Article Title: TUNE: a Tool for Underwater Noise Evaluation

Article References: Caradonna, V., Buogo, S., Azzellino, A., Vicinanza, D., & Borsani, J. F. (2026). TUNE: a Tool for Underwater Noise Evaluation. SoftwareX, 35, Article 103008. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2026.103008

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.softx.2026.103008

Keywords: underwater noise, TUNE software, Marine Strategy Framework Directive, shipping noise, hydrophone calibration, sound pressure level, decidecade bands, power spectral density, ocean acoustics, marine monitoring, MATLAB, environmental protection