ArcticBirdSounds:An open-access, multiyear, and detailed annotated dataset of bird songs and calls

• Published in: Ecology
• Main Authors: Christin, Sylvain, Chicoine, Christine, O'Neill Sanger, Tommy, Guigueno, Mélanie F., Hansen, Jannik, Lanctot, Richard B., MacNearney, Douglas, Rausch, Jennie, Saalfeld, Sarah T., Schmidt, Niels M., Smith, Paul A., Woodard, Paul F., Hervet, Éric, Lecomte, Nicolas
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Arctic summer; audio recording; bioacoustics; bird; breeding season; multiyear; panArctic; soundscape; vocalization; Arctic; Greenland; Alaska
• Online Access: https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/publications/d0c357a4-8ed5-44b2-9bef-aecce55b19a2; https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4047

Abstract Tracking biodiversity shifts is central to understanding past, present, and future global changes. Recent advances in bioacoustics and the low cost of high-quality automatic recorders are revolutionizing studies in biogeography and community and behavioral ecology with a robust assessment of phenology, species occurrence, and individual activity. This large volume of acoustic recordings has recently generated a plethora of data sets that can now be handled automatically, mostly via big data methods such as deep learning. These approaches need high-quality annotations to classify and detect recorded sounds efficiently. However, very few strongly annotated data sets - i.e. with detailed information on start and end time of each vocalization - are openly accessible to the public. Moreover, these data sets mostly cover temperate species and are usually limited to a single year of recordings. Here, we present ArcticBirdSounds, the first open-access, multisite, and multiyear strongly annotated data set of arctic bird vocalizations. ArcticBirdSounds offers 20?hours of annotated recordings over two years (2018, 2019), taken from 15 distinct plots within 6 locations across the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland. Recordings cover the arctic vertebrates' breeding period and are evenly spaced during the day; they capture most species breeding there with 12,933 temporal annotations in 49 classes of sounds. While these data can be used for many pressing ecological questions, it is also a unique resource for methodological development to help meet the challenges of fast ecosystem transformations such as those happening in the Arctic. All data including audio files, annotation files, and companion spreadsheets are available in an Open Science Framework repository published under a CC BY 4.0 License. Tracking biodiversity shifts is central to understanding past, present, and future global changes. Recent advances in bioacoustics and the low cost of high-quality automatic recorders are revolutionizing studies in ...