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Description
Laboratory water tanks are widely used to investigate the effects of underwater noise on aquatic organisms. However, small bounded volumes generate complex and highly reverberant acoustic fields, and the spatial distribution of sound inside experimental tanks is often insufficiently characterized prior to behavioural or physiological studies. As a result, the acoustic exposure experienced by organisms may vary significantly within the tank, introducing uncertainty in controlled noise experiments. This work presents an automated methodology for three-dimensional acoustic field mapping in laboratory tanks based on broadband impulse response measurements. A spatial scan is performed throughout the tank, and at each measurement position a broadband excitation signal is recorded and processed through deconvolution to estimate the impulse response. The methodology is applied to an experimental tank previously used for low-frequency and virtual reality exposure studies and the resulting dataset allows the spatial variability of the sound field within the tank to be assessed and provides a reproducible framework for tank calibration prior to bioacoustic experiments. This approach contributes to improving the reliability and interpretability of controlled underwater noise studies conducted in laboratory environments, focusing on fish or other marine organisms.