An annotated library of underwater acoustic recordings for testing and training automated algorithms for detecting Antarctic blue and fin whale sounds

This annotated library contains both a data set and a data product.

The data set contains a sub-sample of underwater recordings made around Antarctica from 2005-2017. These recordings were curated and sub-sampled from a variety of national and academic recording campaigns. Recordings were made using a variety of different instruments, and sub-samples span 11 different combinations of site and year. Spatial coverage of the recordings includes sites in the Western Antarctic Peninsula, Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific sectors. Temporal coverage of recordings covers a representative sample throughout each recording year for the years of 2005, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017. The focus is on low-frequency sounds of blue and fin whales, so curated recordings have been downsampled to sample rates of either 250, 500, 1000 or 2000 Hz. Recordings are all in 16-bit wav format. The file name of each wav file contains a timestamp with the date and time of the start of that file. Recordings are contained in the /wav/ subfolder for each site-year (e.g. Casey2014/wav).

The data product is in the form of annotations that describe the times within each WAV file that contain detections of blue and fin whale sounds. Each annotations are stored as a row in a tab-separated text file (with descriptive column headers), and each text file describes a particular type of sound. These annotation text files are formatted as Selection Tables that can be directly imported into the software program Raven Pro 1.5 (Cornell Bioacoustics Laboratory).

Full description of the details of the creation and use of this dataset are described in the draft manuscript contained in the documentation folder.

Identification info

Alternate title: An annotated library of underwater acoustic recordings for testing and training automated algorithms for detecting Antarctic blue and fin whale sounds

Date (Publication): 2020-03-05

Edition: 1

Citation identifier

Dataset DOI

Title: Information and documentation - Digital object identifier system

Date (Publication): 2012-04-23

Citation identifier: ISO 26324:2012

Citation identifier: doi:10.26179/5e6056035c01b

Originator

Miller, B.S., Stafford, K.M., Van Opzeeland, I., Harris, D., Samaran, F., šIrović, A., Buchan, S., Findlay, K., Balcazar, N., Nieukirk , S., Leroy, E.C., Aulich, M., Shabangu, F.W., Dziak, R.P., Lee, W., Hong, J.

Publisher

Australian Antarctic Data Centre

Principal investigator

MILLER, BRIAN SETH

Australian Antarctic Division

203 Channel Highway

Kingston

Tasmania

7050

Australia

+61 3 6232 3153

Principal investigator

STAFFORD, KATHLEEN M

Principal investigator

VAN OPZEELAND, ILSE

Principal investigator

HARRIS, DANIELLE

Principal investigator

SAMARAN, FLORE

Principal investigator

ŠIROVIĆ, ANA

Principal investigator

BUCHAN, SUSANNAH

Principal investigator

FINDLAY, KEN

Principal investigator

BALCAZAR, NAYSA

Principal investigator

NIEUKIRK, SHARON

Principal investigator

LEROY, EMMANUELLE C

Principal investigator

AULICH, MEGHAN

Principal investigator

SHABANGU, FANNIE W

Principal investigator

DZIAK, ROBERT P

Principal investigator

LEE, WON SANG

Principal investigator

HONG, JONG KUK

Collaborator

MILLER, BRIAN SETH

Australian Antarctic Division

203 Channel Highway

Kingston

Tasmania

7050

Australia

+61 3 6232 3153

Name: CAASM Metadata

Website: https://data.aad.gov.au/metadata/records/AcousticTrends_BlueFinLibrary

Purpose: Since 2001 hundreds of thousands of hours of underwater acoustic recordings have been made throughout the Southern Ocean south of 60°S. Detailed analysis of the presence of the distinctive calls of Antarctic marine mammals in these circumpolar recordings could provide novel insights into their ecology, but manual inspection of the entirety of all recordings by experts would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Automated signal processing methods have now developed to the point that they can be applied to these data in a cost-effective manner. However training and evaluating the efficacy of these automated signal processing methods still requires a representative library of sounds that have been annotated to identify the true presence and true absence of different sound types. This work presents such a library of annotated recordings for the purpose of training and evaluating automated detectors of Antarctic blue and fin whales. Creation of the library has focused on the annotation of a representative sample of recordings curated by the Acoustic Trends Working Group of the International Whaling Commission’s Southern Ocean Research Partnership (IWC-SORP) in order to ensure that automated algorithms can be developed and tested across a broad range of instruments, locations, and years. Specifically, we have annotated low frequency sounds (<150 Hz) produced by blue and fin whales, and we have qualitatively noted the presence of common Antarctic noise sources such as ice, wind, seismic surveys, and ships.

Status: Completed

Custodian

AU/AADC > Australian Antarctic Data Centre, Australia - AADC, DATA OFFICER (DATA CENTER CONTACT)

Australian Antarctic Division

203 Channel Highway

Kingston

Tasmania

7050

Australia

+61 3 6232 3244

+61 3 6232 3351 (facsimile)

Temporal resolution: PT0.004S

Topic category

Biota
Oceans

Extent

Description: Temporal Coverage

Temporal extent

TimePeriod: 2005-01-01 2017-12-30

Extent

Description: Vertical Extent - Altitude

Vertical element

Minimum value: 0

Maximum value: 0

Identifier: urn:x-ogc:def:cs:EPSG:6499

Name: Vertical CS. Axis: height (H). Orientation: up. UoM: m.

Identifier: urn:x-ogc:def:axis:EPSG:114

Name: height

Extent

Description: Vertical Extent - Depth

Vertical element

Minimum value: 100

Maximum value: 3000

Identifier: urn:x-ogc:def:cs:EPSG:6498

Name: Vertical CS. Axis: depth (D). Orientation: down. UoM: m.

Identifier: urn:x-ogc:def:axis:EPSG:113

Name: depth

Title: An open access dataset for developing automated detectors of Antarctic baleen whale sounds and performance evaluation of two commonly used detectors

Date (Publication): 2020

Author

Brian S. Miller Kathleen M. Stafford, Ilse Van Opzeeland, Danielle Harris, Flore Samaran, Ana Širović, Susannah Buchan, Ken Findlay, Naysa Balcazar, Sharon Nieukirk , Emmanuelle C. Leroy, Meghan Aulich, Fannie W. Shabangu, Robert P. Dziak, Won Sang Lee, Jong Kuk Hong

Other citation details: Under review