An annotated set of audio recordings of Eastern North American birds containing frequency, time, and species information

Acoustic recordings of soundscapes are an important category of audio data
which 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 datasets of soundscape recordings are publicly available.
Further still, there are no publicly available strongly-labeled soundscape
recordings of bird sounds which contain information on timing, frequency,
and species. Therefore, we present the first dataset 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, PA. 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 dataset may be numerous, and include the
training, validation, and testing of certain advanced machine learning
models which detect or classify bird sounds.