Antarctic Whale Call Recordings and Annotations from 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 automated detectors. It supports a multi-observer capture-recapture analysis for bioacoustic call density estimation.

Use Cases

• Benchmark automated whale call detectors against multi-observer human annotations.
• Analyze seasonal patterns of Antarctic blue and fin whale vocalizations based on year-round sampling.
• Train machine learning models for low-frequency biological sound classification using labeled audio segments.
• Conduct capture-recapture population density estimation using independent detection histories.
• Study the consistency and bias in human analyst annotations for bioacoustic signals.

Strengths

• Approximately 200 hours of high-quality acoustic recordings sampled at 1000 Hz.
• Annotations provided by three independent human analysts, enabling robust ground-truth adjudication.
• Recordings distributed evenly throughout a full year, providing representative seasonal coverage.
• Associated with a peer-reviewed publication detailing the methodology for call density estimation.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count for the consolidated detection capture history is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The dataset is a 2% subset of the total recording effort, which may limit statistical power for rare events.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network via data_gov_au.

Collection Method

Passive acoustic recordings collected with an AAD Moored Acoustic Recorder (MAR) deployed at ~2700 m depth.

Time Range

23 December 2018 to 13 December 2019.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-04 08:40:50.756782; freshness should be verified.

Geography

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