#Whale sounds manual#

Approximately 360,000 blue whales were caught across the Southern Hemisphere in the mid-twentieth century, depleting the population to less than 1% of their pre-whaling population 5. Historically, blue whales were heavily exploited throughout the Southern Ocean. Monitoring blue and fin whales in the Southern Ocean Many of these recordings were made for the purposes of learning about two endangered species that are especially detectable by PAM: Antarctic blue whales ( Balaenoptera musculus intermedia) and fin whales ( B. Since 2001, hundreds of thousands of hours of long-term acoustic recordings that span many years have been collected throughout the Southern Ocean. PAM has especially high potential to provide information about marine mammals in remote or difficult to access areas, such as Antarctic waters.

Underwater passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) for marine mammals is a fast-growing field due to increased availability of, and flexibility in deploying, underwater recording devices 1, 2, 3.

It can also be expanded upon to facilitate standardization of subsequent analysis of spatiotemporal trends in call-density of these circumpolar species. The availability of this library will facilitate development of improved detectors for the acoustic presence of Southern Ocean blue and fin whales. To demonstrate the utility of the library, we characterise the performance of two automated detection algorithms that have been commonly used to detect stereotyped calls of blue and fin whales. Creation of the library has focused on the annotation of a representative sample of recordings to ensure that automated algorithms can be developed and tested across a broad range of instruments, locations, environmental conditions, and years. This work presents such a library of annotated recordings for the purpose of training and evaluating automated detectors of Antarctic blue and fin whale calls.

However training and evaluating the efficacy of these automated signal processing methods still requires a representative annotated library of sounds to identify the true presence and absence of different sound types. Automated signal processing methods have now developed to the point that they can be applied to these data in a cost-effective manner.

#Whale sounds manual#

Detailed analysis of the occurrence of marine mammal sounds in these circumpolar recordings could provide novel insights into their ecology, but manual inspection of the entirety of all recordings would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Since 2001, hundreds of thousands of hours of underwater acoustic recordings have been made throughout the Southern Ocean south of 60В° S.