Abstract:
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 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.
Automated signal processing methods have now developed to the point that they can be applied
to these data in a cost-efective manner. However training and evaluating the efcacy of these
automated signal processing methods still requires a representative annotated library of sounds to
identify the true presence and absence of diferent sound types. This work presents such a library of
annotated recordings for the purpose of training and evaluating automated detectors of Antarctic blue
and fn whale calls. 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. 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 fn whales. The availability of this library will facilitate
development of improved detectors for the acoustic presence of Southern Ocean blue and fn whales.
It can also be expanded upon to facilitate standardization of subsequent analysis of spatiotemporal
trends in call-density of these circumpolar species.
