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Underwater passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is of growing importance for monitoring the health of aquatic environments. Standard practices use expensive hydrophones to sample soundscapes. They must either be linked to surface recording rigs or use autonomous instrumentation which comes at a premium cost. Although citizen science projects could be of great value to PAM by increasing the number of underwater recordings collected around the world, there is a lack of available low-cost and user-friendly recording hardware. However, consumer-grade action cameras potentially offer an accessible alternative to traditional hydrophones, capable of capturing underwater acoustic recordings.

We evaluated the performance of two models of GoPro underwater action cameras deployed as PAM recorders. We tested these cameras against a research-grade hydrophone in a range of shallow tropical sea …