Dear colleagues, On behalf of my coauthors, I am pleased to announce our new publication:
Marie J. Zahn, Michael Ladegaard, Malene Simon, Kathleen M. Stafford, Taiki Sakai, Kristin L. Laidre. (2024). Accurate species classification of Arctic toothed whale echolocation clicks using one-third octave ratios. *J. Acoust. Soc. Am. *155 (4): 2359–2370. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0025460. In short, we advance methods to classify beluga and narwhal clicks using a new acoustic parameter based on one-third octave levels. The article can be found HERE <https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0025460>. Our publication was also featured in a Scilight article "Caller ID for toothed whales" which is freely available online HERE <https://doi.org/10.1063/10.0025640> (DOI: 10.1063/10.0025640). ABSTRACT: Passive acoustic monitoring has been an effective tool to study cetaceans in remote regions of the Arctic. Here, we advance methods to acoustically identify the only two Arctic toothed whales, the beluga (*Delphinapterus leucas*) and narwhal (*Monodon monoceros*), using echolocation clicks. Long-term acoustic recordings collected from moorings in Northwest Greenland were analyzed. Beluga and narwhal echolocation signals were distinguishable using spectrograms where beluga clicks had most energy >30 kHz and narwhal clicks had a sharp lower frequency limit near 20 kHz. Changes in one-third octave levels (TOL) between two pairs of one-third octave bands were compared from over one million click spectra. Narwhal clicks had a steep increase between the 16 and 25 kHz TOL bands that was absent in beluga click spectra. Conversely, beluga clicks had a steep increase between the 25 and 40 kHz TOL bands that was absent in narwhal click spectra. Random Forest classification models built using the 16 to 25 kHz and 25 to 40 kHz TOL ratios accurately predicted the species identity of 100% of acoustic events. Our findings support the use of echolocation TOL ratios in future automated click classifiers for acoustic monitoring of Arctic toothed whales and potentially for other odontocete species. Feel free to email me with any questions or if you'd like a PDF copy. Best, Marie Zahn -- *Marie Zahn, PhD | *she/her Postdoctoral Scholar Applied Physics Lab, Polar Science Center, University of Washington NASA Jet Propulsion Lab/Caltech *UW *| mz...@uw.edu *JPL *| marie.j.z...@jpl.nasa.gov *w *| mariezahn.com
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