Abstract:

This dataset contains a subset of LADC passive acoustic system buoys data which was collected in 2015 used to identify the three different species of beaked whales in the Gulf of Mexico. The data were collected at three locations in the Gulf of Mexico: Northern site, Southern site and Western site, respectively. The species of beaked whales are Cuvier’s beaked whale, Gervais’ beaked whale and an unidentified species that we labeled 'BWG', which is Beaked whale Gulf. Those species were detected by using a three-stage detection algorithm. The first stage detector is based on multi-band energy comparison with a baseline threshold. The second stage detector performs a multi-attribute analysis on the first stage detection events to classify potential detections as clicks from a beaked whale family and separate them from other signals. The third stage detector separates identified beaked whales into different species using clustering analysis algorithm. These data were used to estimate and analyze densities of beaked whales in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Text files contain the locations of the buoys analyzed, and the CSV files contain the detections from each buoy. The results of the third stage classifier are presented in a separate dataset.

Suggested Citation:

Natalia Sidorovskaia, Kun Li. 2017. Beaked whale detections from stage 1 and 2 using a three-stage energy detector and classifier in the northern Gulf of Mexico, June-October 2015. Distributed by: GRIIDC, Harte Research Institute, Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. doi:10.7266/N700005N

Publications:

LeBien, J. G., & Ioup, J. W. (2018). Species-level classification of beaked whale echolocation signals detected in the northern Gulf of Mexico. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 144(1), 387–396. doi:10.1121/1.5047435

Li, K., Sidorovskaia, N. A., & Tiemann, C. O. (2020). Model-based unsupervised clustering for distinguishing Cuvier’s and Gervais’ beaked whales in acoustic data. Ecological Informatics, 58, 101094. doi:10.1016/j.ecoinf.2020.101094

Guilment, T., Sidorovskaia, N., & Li, K. (2020). Modeling the acoustic repertoire of Cuvier’s beaked whale clicks. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147(5), 3605–3612. doi:10.1121/10.0001266

Purpose:

These data were used to estimate and analyze densities of beaked whales in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

Data Parameters and Units:

txt file: latitude (decimal degrees), longitude (decimal degrees), depth (m); xlsx files: serial number (click number from the beginning), clicks per min (for each stage and each species: BWG, Cuvier, Gervais), timestamp (UTC (GMT), format uses 12 digits, which represent year, month, day, hour and minute. ex, 201506251230, Digits: (1:4)2015---year, (5:6)06---month, (7:8)25--day, (9:10)12---hour, (11:12)30---minute)

Instruments:

Bottom-moored Environmental Acoustic Recording System (EARS) passive acoustic buoys

Individual Files: