It's probably much easier to find a company selling acoustic modems than to try and create your own...very challenging environment to work within. I have about 10 years working with underwater acoustics (as a non-engineer). 

To give you the best advice, I need a bit more information about your specific application. Underwater communication typically relies on acoustic modems because radio waves don't travel well through water. For longer distances, a hybrid solution is often used. This could involve an acoustic modem transmitting data from your underwater sensor to a surface buoy or platform. The buoy could then relay the data to shore using traditional radio communication, such as 900MHz radios (even commercially available options like Ubiquiti radios, depending on distance and line-of-sight). To help me understand your needs and recommend the right approach, could you tell me more about:

Data Rate Requirements: How much data do you need to transmit, and how often?

Range: What is the vertical distance between your sensor and the surface receiver?

Environment: Are you working in shallow or deep water? What is the water temperature, salinity, and expected noise level?

Power Budget: How much power is available for the underwater sensor and modem?

Cost: What is your budget for the acoustic modem system?

Integration: How will you integrate the modem with your sensor and surface receiving system?

Real-time or Delayed: Do you need the data in real-time, or can it be stored and transmitted later?

Great resources being shared! Darwin Core is a commonly used bio-data standard as well.  

For bioacoustic data, there are some metadata standards (GUANO is used by pretty much all the terrestrial ARU manufacturers). Some use Tethys as well.

Recordings are typically recorded as .WAV files but many store them as .flac (a type of lossless compression) to save on space. 

For ethics, usually acoustic data platforms with a public-facing component (e.g., Arbimon, WildTrax, etc.) will mask presence/absence geographical data for species listed on the IUCN RedList, CITES, etc. so that you're not giving away geographical information on where a species is to someone who would use it to go hunt them for example. 

Hello, I am experienced in conservation data strategy. If you want to have a conversation you can reach me at SustainNorth@gmail.com.

Bird Monitoring Data Exchange is a standard often used for birds data. 

 Is thisvfunding grant an opportunity? https://www.dronedeploy.com/blog/expand-your-impact-with-a-grant-from-dronedeploy

Hi David, this is an incredible project. Would you be interested in sharing more of your experience with AI and wildlife conservation with my students? They are currently researching this, and would greatly benefit from speaking with a professional in the field. Thank you for considering!

Hats off to your team for this absolute game-changing technology! 

We rescue stray and wild animals in Taiwan, and the bulk of our work is saving animals maimed by wire snares and gin traps. We've become better at finding the devices, but still not good at all. There's simply too much difficult terrain to cover and we only have eyeballs and hiking sticks to find them. We know roughly where they are because the maimed stray dogs will eventually find their way onto a road and be reported to us. Then we close one of them, set up a trail camera, get the evidence of the poacher in the act of re-setting it, and get him prosecuted and shut down. But we need to be able to scale this greatly.

I've been using a thermal-imaging drone to locate stricken animals and am now considering buying another drone more suited to finding traps and snares. Some newer drones are able to navigate through forest without crashing into thin branches, so I've been looking into equipping one with LiDAR to see if that can detect the devices. But then I came across your YouTube channel and then this post about using airborne synthetic radar, and I'm incredibly excited to see where you might take this incredible technology.

How can we get our hands on the SAR you're using? It's 3 kg, right? I'm wondering if I could fit it to a suitable drone. If it works above forest canopy to detect traps and snares on the forest floor, then I can use a load-carrying drone instead of a light obstacle-avoidance drone.

If you made the SAR yourselves, then maybe think about crowdfunding for your project. I'd happily pledge funds if it meant I could get my hands on the kind of equipment you're using.

I can't tell you how happy I am thinking about all the animals' lives you'll save with this. Don't just remove the snares—gather evidence and put the poachers out of business too!

Jared's answer is excellent IMHO. One level down, you have a couple of options. One is to charge for the convenience of buying a finished, assembled, and tested product, that's for the folks that have money and no time. Those that have time but no money can build it themselves from the open source. One danger to this approach is if low cost chinese clones come on the market, whether they do probably depends a lot on the size of the market.

Another option is to withhold some 'pro/plus' feature from the open source, that depends on whether you can identify such features. A similar option is to offer features that big outfits with good funding need. For example, you could offer calibrated versions at a premium, if that's applicable and needed by such organizations. In many cases companies sell devices cheap that are usable by someone who one has one or a couple and then charge for a management system for those that have dozens or hundreds of devices, dunno whether this applies to your case. All this comes down to whether you can segment your customer base so you can create premium features for the wealthy segment.

Odor based methods would be interesting. Provided they didn't need to be replenished too often.

We find varied stimulus prevents habituation.

Hi, I've been using ChatGPT for quick labeling of camera trap recordings. I just posted this as a separate discussion here: 

Interesting!!

I found this interesting