An annotated library of underwater acoustic recordings for testing and training automated algorithms for detecting Antarctic blue and fin whale sounds

The focus is on low-frequency sounds of blue and fin whales, so curated recordings have been downsampled to sample rates of either 250, 500, 1000 or 2000 Hz. Recordings are all in 16-bit wav format. The file name of each wav file contains a timestamp with the date and time of the start of that file.

Recordings are contained in the /wav/ subfolder for each site-year (e.g. Casey2014/wav). The data product is in the form of annotations that describe the times within each WAV file that contain detections of blue and fin whale sounds. Each annotations are stored as a row in a tab-separated text file (with descriptive column headers), and each text file describes a particular type of sound.

These annotation text files are formatted as Selection Tables that can be directly imported into the software program Raven Pro 1.5 (Cornell Bioacoustics Laboratory). Full description of the details of the creation and use of this dataset are described in the draft manuscript contained in the documentation folder.