Christopher W. Clark

Christopher W. Clark is the Imogene P. Johnson Director of the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Senior Scientist in the Department of Neurobiology & Behavior at Cornell University. Dr. Clark has a long history of successfully working at the interface between science, applied engineering, industry, regulations and NGOs in order to quantify and mitigate potential impacts of human activities on marine mammals. Dr. Clark’s current research areas include acoustic monitoring of large whale distributions, behaviors, and movements relative to environmental factors and man-made activities using a variety of passive acoustic detection, classification, localization and tracking technologies. He is also engaged in collaborative research efforts integrating physical oceanographic and biological productivity measures, aerial surveys, genetic and photo-ID data, and acoustic detections. He leads the development and application of distributed autonomous listening systems and near-real-time automatic acoustic detection systems to quantify the spatio-temporal occurrence of the endangered whales. Dr. Clark and his research staff have developed a suite of analytical procedures and metrics that quantify the acoustic spatio-temporal variability of noise in ocean ecosystems. He has evolved through this process a new paradigm for evaluating and measuring the magnitude of risks to individual animals and populations as a result of the loss of acoustic habitat.