Within the Interreg Italy-Croatia SOUNDSCAPE project a basin-scale, cross-national, long-term underwater monitoring in the Northern Adriatic Sea was carried out (https://www.italy-croatia.eu/web/soundscape). A broad network of nine monitoring stations, characterized by different natural conditions and anthropogenic pressures, ensured acoustic data collection from March 2020 to June 2021, including the first full lockdown period related to the COVID-19 pandemic (March–April 2020). Calibrated stationary recorders featured with an omnidirectional Neptune Sonar D60 Hydrophone recorded continuously 24h a day (48 kHz, 16 bit). Data were analysed to Sound Pressure Levels (SPLs, dB re 1 uPa) that are here released as a dataset composed of 20 seconds averaged SPL output files for each station. Data are archived using structured hdf5 files, each one containing metadata and SPL data, according to ICES (International Council for the Exploration of the Sea) continuous noise data specification. A research object with a jupyter notebook developed to post process SPL data is available at https://www.doi.org/10.24424/tkqc-zr42.. A new version, Version 2022-12, has been released at https://zenodo.org/record/7472152, including an enlarged dataset and revised positions of the monitoring stations.

This work was supported by EU-Interreg Italy-Croatia 2014/2020 – CBC Program (Contract number 10043643) and by the RELIANCE project funded under call "Implementing the European Open Science Cloud" (H2020-INFRAEOSC-2018-2020).

{"references": ["Continuous Noise Database (https://underwaternoise.ices.dk/continuous), 2022. ICES, Copenhagen"]}