Objective classification of North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) vocalizations to improve passive acoustic detection
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Conservation Biology, Marine Biology
- Keywords
- North Atlantic right whales, North Atlantic right whales, North Atlantic right whales, acoustic monitoring, classification
- Copyright
- © 2014 Urazghildiiev et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Objective classification of North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) vocalizations to improve passive acoustic detection. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e322v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.322v1
Abstract
Passive acoustic monitoring is playing an increasing role in the detection of endangered North Atlantic right whales (NARW). Previous acoustic monitoring has relied on a single stereotyped vocalization, the upcall. Here the entire repertoire produced by NARW during the winter and early spring in Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts is described. An objective sound classification scheme and automatic classification algorithm were developed. Nine days of acoustic recordings were used for the data analysis and a total of 9,611 right whale sounds were identified. The objective classification scheme of right whale sounds allowed for rapid identification of a diversity of right whale sounds. These sounds were assigned to 6 classes of narrowband upcalls, downsweep, complex and high frequency calls, wideband gunshot sounds and complex sounds. Results indicate that the prevalence of upcalls varied from 28% of detected calls in January to 80% in April. Other classes of signals were also well represented in the repertoire including the narrowband complex(10-36%) and high frequency calls (1-26%), wideband gunshot sounds (4-25%) and wideband complex sounds (0 – 25%). The prevalence of non-upcall signals suggests that including more signals classes may improve rates of detection for right whales in the Cape Cod Bay habitat.
Supplemental Information
Figure 1: Map of the sensor array geometry. MARU locations areshown as black, numbered circles.
Figure 2: Spectrogramsof narrowband upsweep FM signals (NU).
The
spectrograms were obtained using 1024 point FFT with Hann window, 75% overlap, and
sampling rate of 5 kHz.
