This a continuation of a 2023 CREOi-funded project. In 2022, Washington State gave highest priority to the protection and restoration of kelp forests in the Salish Sea. At the same time, state agencies acknowledged that apart from mapping the geographic extent of the kelp canopy, they lacked affordable methods for monitoring the ecological functioning of kelp forests. The present project explored the use of “soundscapes,” i.e. monitoring of fishes and other soniferous marine organisms acoustically, as a means of reliably quantifying wildlife diversity and abundance beneath the kelp canopy. A necessary first step was to identify soniferous fishes associated with Salish Sea kelp forests; document their characteristic sounds; and demonstrate that existing machine-learning software could recognize and quantify these sounds in automated underwater recordings under real-world conditions. The first phase of this project in 2024 attempted to record soniferous fishes in captivity in the Seattle Aquarium and the Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve Breazaele Interpretive Center; and in the field using mobile hydrophone gear deployed in kelp forests for limited time periods. Tentative recordings were made of Copper Rockfish and Pacific Herring. Two Loggerhead SNAP autonomous, fully submersible hydrophone systems were acquired and deployed at south Lopez Island kelp forests in 2024-2025, where they recorded nearly 400 hours in five-minute segments spanning six months. Kaleidoscope (Wildlife Acoustics) cluster analysis software was trained on recordings of Copper and Quillback Rockfish, and Pacific Herring, collected by the first phase of this study and by Simon Fraser University as a partner in the recently formed FishSounds consortium. Filtering for rockfish and herring sonifery was unproductive although these fishes have been caught repeatedly near hydrophone locations, and filtering for other sounds, such as propeller and engine noise, was successful. At this stage, it remains unclear whether kelp forest fishes in the Salish Sea produce sounds that are sufficiently distinct and frequent to serve as monitoring data. Further investigations are planned using a real-time streaming hydrophone and video system installed beneath a wharf, potentially with crowd-sourced review and analysis similar to the Lime Kiln Live Hydrophone marine mammal program on San Juan Island. ($9,000)