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Abstract Acoustic recordings of soundscapes are an important category of audio data that can be useful for answering a variety of questions, and an entire discipline within ecology, dubbed “soundscape ecology,” has risen to study them. Bird sound is often the focus of studies of soundscapes due to the ubiquitousness of birds in most terrestrial environments and their high vocal activity. Autonomous acoustic recorders have increased the quantity and availability of recordings of natural soundscapes while mitigating the impact of human observers on community behavior. However, such recordings are of little use without analysis of the sounds they contain. Manual analysis currently stands as the best means of processing this form of data for use in certain applications within soundscape ecology, but it is a laborious task, sometimes requiring many hours of human review to process comparatively few hours of recording. For this reason, few annotated data sets of soundscape recordings are publicly available. Further still, there are no publicly available strongly labeled soundscape recordings of bird sounds that contain information on timing, frequency, and species. Therefore, we present the first data set of strongly labeled bird sound soundscape recordings under free use license. These data were collected in the Northeastern United States at Powdermill Nature Reserve, Rector, Pennsylvania, USA. Recordings encompass 385 minutes of dawn chorus recordings collected by autonomous acoustic recorders between the months of April through July 2018. Recordings were collected in continuous bouts on four days during the study period and contain 48 species and 16,052 annotations. Applications of this data set may be numerous and include the training, validation, and testing of certain advanced machine‐learning models that detect or classify bird sounds. There are no copyright or propriety restrictions; please cite this paper when using materials within.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
Overview of the Atlantic Deepwater Ecosystem Observatory Network
The Atlantic Deepwater Ecosystem Observatory Network (ADEON) along the US Mid- and South Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) collected multiple years of measurements that describe the ecology and soundscape of the OCS. Ocean processes, marine life dynamics, and human use of the ocean are each three dimensional and time dependent, and occur at many spatial and temporal scales. Because no single measurement system (in situ or remote) is sufficient for describing dynamic ocean variables, the approach taken by ADEON was to integrate ocean measurements and models. Acoustic information was combined with contextual data from space-based remote sensing, hydrographic sensors, and mobile platforms in order to fully comprehend how human, biologic, and natural abiotic components create the OCS soundscape and influence its ecosystem dynamics. Standardized methodologies were developed for comparing soundscapes across regions and for generating predictive models of the soundscape and overall ecology of the OCS at 200–900 m water depths. These data provide a baseline for pattern and trend analyses of ambient sound and the ecosystem components of the OCS soundscapes. They contribute to understanding of regional processes over multi-year timescales and support ecosystem-based management of marine resources in an acoustically under-sampled ocean region.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2125868
- PAR ID:
- 10600512
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oceanography
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Oceanography
- ISSN:
- 1042-8275
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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