Data collection will be made using the following procedures. The vessel’s acoustic system will be calibrated using standard methods (Foote, 1987) at least annually. The critical acoustic system settings will use values that have been optimised for open-ocean transits. The settings used will be recorded to form part of the metadata. When appropriate we will organise shipboard pre-voyage briefings with the ships officers, vessel managers and ourselves. We will provide the ships officers with a document describing the necessary echosounder settings and set up procedures.  Effective communication between ourselves, the ships officers and the vessel managers will be maintained to ensure that data is collected according to these protocols. The acoustic data is recorded to 2.5” external hard drive. A simple exchange system between old and new hard drives will be used at major port calls. The exchanged hard drives will be returned to CSIRO for archive and then returned to the vessel.

Quality control procedures will be applied to the logged acoustic data to ensure that the signal has not been unduly affected by degradation due to rough seas or other sources. The quality checked data will be processed to provide calibrated measures of acoustic backscatter for cell sizes resolutions of 10 m vertical, and 1 km horizontal. This data will be posted on the eMII web page. The raw acoustic data will be managed with a meta data base and, subject to eMII discussions, software could be provided to browse the data via the web using a WMS or WCS/WFS protocol.