Spatial and temporal separation of toothed whales in the western North Atlantic

A diverse group of toothed whale species inhabits the pelagic habitats of the western North Atlantic, competing for overlapping prey resources. Historical data deficits have limited fundamental research into many of these species, such as establishing baselines of distribution and abundance, so their occurrence and habitat use patterns are not well characterized. Periodic cycles in activity have been reported at a range of temporal scales for odontocetes in other regions, such as seasonal movements, foraging activity modulated by lunar cycles, and diel activity patterns. A variety of spatial, temporal, and behavioral separation strategies have also been observed among predator guilds in both marine and terrestrial systems, and these may also contribute to ob served spatiotemporal patterns in activity. Re cently, passive acoustic data has been applied to monitor odontocete species continuously, with im proved detection and species discrimination for some cryptic species. We used a long-t..., Time series of labeled odontocete echolocation clicks were derived by (1) from a large passive acoustic data set collected through repeated mooring deployments. Clicks were detected and classified to species using a machine learning workflow, and then classification error was quantified by manual verification of a subset of the labeled data. For each species/group we binned the time series of labeled clicks into 5-minute time bins, then scaled the number of clicks per bin by recording effort as well as the classifier error rates which were calculated on a per-species per-deployment basis. For analysis of temporal patterns in species presence and activity, we considered binomial presence/absence in each 5-minute bin to be a more reliable metric of species presence than the actual number of clicks labeled to that species, since some clicks were isolated by the clustering algorithm and therefore were unavailable to be labeled by the classifier. To remove spurious presence bins based on ver..., Odontocete species acoustic presence was detected and classified at the 11 western North Atlantic passive acoustic monitoring sites using a combination of automated methods and manual review, as detailed in (1) and (2). Each of these .csv files contains information on the acoustic presence of a single odontocete species/group, given in the file name, at each of the acoustic monitoring sites (listed above in this README file). The temporal granularity is 5-minute bins. The first column of each file gives the time stamps of all 5-minute bins spanning the study period (1 May, 2016 to 30 April, 2019). Subsequent columns correspond to species' acoustic presence at each of the acoustic monitoring sites, as indicated by the site name abbreviation in the column header, ordered from north to south. The values in each cell indicate the number of echolocation clicks labeled as the given species in a particular time bin at a particular site. These values have been scaled by both effort and classifi..., # Spatial and temporal separation of toothed whales in the western North Atlantic

**Access this dataset on Dryad:** https://doi.org/10.6076/D1WS32

**Authors:**
*Name:* Rebecca E. Cohen (point of contact)
*Affiliation:* K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego
*Address:* Ithaca, NY
*Email:* [e-mail]

*Name:* Kaitlin E. Frasier
*Affiliation:* Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego

*Name:* Simone Baumann-Pickering
*Affiliation:* Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego

*Name:* John A. Hildebrand
*Affiliation:* Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego

**Dates of data collection:** May 2016 - April 2019

**Geographic location of data collection:**

| Site | Lat | Lon | Depth (m) |
| ---- | --- | --- | --------- |
| Heezen Canyon (HZ) | 41.06°N | 66.35°W | ...