The combination of physical and biological sounds that form the ambient acoustic environment is increasingly recognized as a fundamental element of habitats. Marine soundscapes are known to influence key ecological processes such as reproduction, larval recruitment and trophic interactions, and there is increasing interest in the use of passive acoustic monitoring as a non-destructive habitat assessment tool. This talk will explore how template matching and machine learning techniques can be used for the detection and classification of the sounds produced by fish and invertebrates with the coastal ocean, and how these data can be analyzed quantitatively to assess animal behavior and biodiversity.