Real-Time Acoustic Detection: Automated Vessel Monitoring for Chile’s MPAs

Integral’s system gave us something we had never had before: a real-time, automated signal from the water. For ocean conservation in Latin America, that capability changes everything.

Rodrigo Oyanedel, Ph.D. Director, Mar Futura

Key Personnel

Grace Chang, Ph.D. Senior Science Advisor, Director of Research and Development

Bio

Kaustubha Raghukumar, Ph.D. Senior Consultant

Bio

Frank W. Spada Senior Scientist

Bio

Challenge

Chile’s coastline stretches over 6,000 kilometers, sheltering some of the most biodiverse marine ecosystems in the Pacific. To protect them, the Chilean government has established a network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs)—but designation alone doesn’t stop illegal fishing. Enforcement is chronically underfunded, enforcers are outnumbered, and the sea doesn’t come with surveillance cameras. Mar Futura, a Chilean marine conservation foundation, set out to change that by testing whether passive acoustic monitoring could serve as an automated, around-the-clock sentinel for protected coastal waters.

Solution

Supported by Integral’s R&D program, we helped Mar Futura to deploy an IC Listen hydrophone system at a coastal MPA site in Chile. The IC Listen hydrophone was submerged and connected via Ethernet cable to an on-site computer running our real-time vessel detection software. The system continuously recorded the underwater acoustic environment, passively listening for the characteristic signatures of motor vessels. When those signatures were detected, the system generated an automated alert in real time, without any human intervention. No active pinging, no disruption to the marine environment, no need for an enforcer to be on watch. The deployment gave Mar Futura something that had not previously existed for MPA monitoring in Chile: a reliable, continuous, automated record of vessel acoustic activity inside a protected zone, operating around the clock regardless of weather, visibility, or staffing levels.

Our Impact

The results were immediate and concrete. For the first time, Mar Futura and the fishing community had an objective, timestamped record of vessel activity inside a Marine Protected Area—the kind of data that enforcers can actually use. The system detected vessel presence with high sensitivity, providing the team with a detailed acoustic picture of when and how frequently boats were operating within the protected boundaries. Beyond the specific deployment, Integral set a performance benchmark that directly shaped Mar Futura’s broader strategy for scalable MPA monitoring across Chile’s coast. The experience demonstrated that professional-grade passive acoustic monitoring is not only technically viable in Chilean field conditions—it is operationally practical, and capable of generating the evidence base that conservation enforcement has long needed but rarely had.

About Mar Futura

Mar Futura is a Chilean marine conservation foundation that develops science-based tools to protect coastal marine ecosystems across Latin America. Their work sits at the intersection of ecology, technology, and ocean governance—designing monitoring systems that are rigorous enough to inform policy and accessible enough to deploy in real field conditions. The Mar Futura team builds tools that give conservation practitioners and enforcement agencies the evidence they need to act. A core conviction drives their work: that protecting the ocean at scale requires not just scientific knowledge, but affordable, operational technology that works in the real world.