Acoustic dataset on geographic variation in bottlenose dolphin (<i>Tursiops truncatus</i>) signature whistles across five Mediterranean and Atlantic sites

Recordings were obtained using passive acoustic monitoring (Pitiüses Islands) or boat-based encounters (all other sites) between 2005 and 2022.

For each signature whistle, eight acoustic parameters describing frequency and frequency modulation were extracted through visual inspection of spectrograms: initial frequency, final frequency, maximum frequency, minimum frequency, frequency range, duration, number of inflection points, and the coefficient of frequency modulation (COFM). The dataset was used to investigate geographic variation in signature whistle structure using multivariate (Principal Component Analysis, PERMANOVA) and univariate statistical approaches.</p>