Antarctic Blue and Fin Whale Acoustic Recordings and Annotations, Casey Station 2019

Approximately 200 hours of underwater acoustic recordings collected at Casey Station, East Antarctica, between December 2018 and December 2019. The dataset includes time-frequency annotations for Antarctic blue and fin whale calls made by three independent human analysts and a consolidated detection history from five observers. It was created by the Australian Ocean Data Network to support a multi-observer capture-recapture analysis.

Use Cases

• Validate automated whale call detectors based on the multi-observer adjudicated ground truth.
• Study the seasonal presence of Antarctic blue and fin whales based on the year-round, representative acoustic sampling.
• Compare inter-observer variability in bioacoustic annotation based on the three independent human analyst annotations.
• Analyze the acoustic characteristics of specific call types (e.g., ABZ-units, D-calls, 20 Hz pulses) based on the detailed call type classifications.

Strengths

• Approximately 200 hours of calibrated acoustic recordings, downsampled to 1000 Hz.
• Adjudicated ground truth from three independent human analysts and an automated detector, supporting robust validation.
• Recordings sampled at approximately 2% of total annual effort, distributed evenly to represent annual conditions.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count for the consolidated detection history is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to data_gov_au, being limited to a single Antarctic station.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network

Collection Method

Passive acoustic recordings collected via a moored acoustic recorder at approximately 2700 m depth, with annotations made using Raven Pro 1.5.

Time Range

23 December 2018 to 13 December 2019

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-16 18:45:17.797645; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Casey Station, East Antarctica (63°48'S, 111°47'E)