Data from: Ocean Gliders for Passive Acoustic Monitoring of Cetaceans and Underwater Noise in a Large Marine Protected Area

Description The dataset consists of underwater recordings collected using a DMON2 digital acoustic monitoring instrument (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MA, USA) onboard a Slocum autonomous underwater glider (Teledyne Webb Research, Falmouth, MA, USA) in and around the Cabrera Archipelago National Park (Balearic Sea, Western Mediterranean, Spain). The glider surveyed 725 km between 1 August and 2 September 2024, collecting approximately 51.2 hours of acoustic recordings using a duty cycle of 30 s recording every 7.5 minutes. Recordings were acquired at a 240 kHz sampling rate and manually screened for cetacean vocalisations, with uninterrupted echolocation click trains and, where possible, individual whistles annotated. The dataset contains detections of sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) echolocation clicks, Risso's dolphin (Grampus griseus) echolocation clicks, as well as unidentified Delphinidae echolocation clicks and whistles. Risso's dolphin detections were identified using a species-specific deep-learning classifier followed by expert manual validation (see Webber et al., 2026 Marine Mammal Science, 2026). Dataset contents File Description 1_CESCAB-raw-flac/ Raw 30-s underwater recordings in FLAC format (19 GB; 6,147 files). 2_CESCAB-annotation-table.txt Annotation table (.txt) containing associated signal metadata. 3_CESCAB-clips-flac/ Individual annotation clips in FLAC format, organised by species and signal type. The annotation clips in "CESCAB-clips-flac" folder are organised as follows: Species name Number of clips Total duration (min) Folder size (GB) Signal Type Physeter macrocephalus 160 227 6.09 Echolocation clicks Grampus griseus 10 17.4 0.48 Echolocation clicks Delphinidae spp. 171 258 6.92 Echolocation clicks Delphinidae spp. 1285 40.7 1.17 Whistles The annotations can be visualised in free Raven Lite software (https://www.ravensoundsoftware.com/raven-pricing/#raven-lite-license) or similar; please note that some custom columns in the .txt annotation tables may not be visible in the free version, as they were created in Raven Pro. Potential applications The dataset provides a valuable resource for studying the acoustic repertoire and spatial distribution of odontocetes in the western Mediterranean Sea. It can support research on cetacean ecology, behaviour, and conservation, and provides training material for the development of automated detection and classification tools. The dataset is also valuable for underwater noise analyses; however, users should note that 432 files in the raw data folder contain glider self-noise and/or surfacing noise (<20 m depth). For these files, this is indicated in the filename, allowing them to be excluded if required, as was done in the associated publication. Acknowledgments The data were collected during a glider mission funded by the CESCAB project (SOCIB Glider Open Access, SOCIB 2024 N-1 AAC 0040) and the TECMAR project (Organismo Autónomo Parques Nacionales, 3002/2023). Code availability All scripts used to process the acoustic recordings, perform the analyses, and reproduce the figures presented in the associated manuscript are openly available on GitHub: https://github.com/SpatialMarine/ms-glider-cescab Related publication Jankauskaite, G., Antichi, S., Cauchy, P., Cerdá, M., Garcia, M., Klinck, H., Mercure-Boissonnault, P., Miralles, A., Tintoré, J., Webber, T., Zarokanellos, D.N., Raga, J.A. and March, D. (2027) Ocean Gliders for Passive Acoustic Monitoring of Cetaceans and Underwater Noise in a Large Marine Protected Area. (Complete and add DOI once published).