Daily and hourly sperm whale presence in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands

Sperm whales exhibit sexual dimorphism and sex-specific latitudinal segregation. Females and their young form social groups and are usually found in temperate and tropical latitudes, while males forage at higher latitudes. Historical whaling data and rare sightings of social groups in high latitude regions of the North Pacific, such as the Gulf of Alaska (GOA) and Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands (BSAI), suggest a more nuanced distribution than previously understood. Sperm whales are the most sighted and recorded cetacean in marine mammal surveys in these regions but capturing their demographic composition and habitat use has proven challenging. This study detects sperm whale presence using passive acoustic data from seven sites in the GOA and BSAI from 2010 to 2019. Differences in click characteristics between males and females (i.e., inter-click and inter-pulse interval) was used as a proxy for animal size/sex to derive time series of animal detections. Generalized additive models with gen..., Passive acoustic recordings were collected at seven sites, two along the BSAI and five in the GOA, between June 2010 and September 2019 (Figure 1; Table 1). Each site had from one to ten deployments which resulted in ~12 years of cumulative recordings between all sites. Individual site temporal coverage varied due to project goals, recorder battery life, data storage space, and duty cycle regimes as detailed below. The sites were in moderate water depths of 780 m to 1200 m (Table 1). We used High-frequency Acoustic Recording Packages (HARPs; Wiggins & Hildebrand 2007) with a sampling rate of 200 kHz which can detect the high-frequency echolocation clicks of odontocetes, including but not limited to, sperm whales.
Sperm whale echolocation clicks were detected using the multi-step approach described in Solsona-Berga et al. 2020 (appendix). These clicks have multiple pulses (Backus & Schevill 1966), 2-9 ms apart, depending upon the size of the animal (Norris & Harvey 1972). As ..., , # Daily and Hourly Sperm Whale Presence in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands

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These .csv files contain compiled data from high-frequency acoustic recording package (HARP; Wiggins & Hildebrand, 2007) deployments at 7 acoustic monitoring sites in the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands.

**AllSites_DayData. csv**: contains daily presence information from all seven deployments with the following variables:

tbin - day (dd/mm/YYYY)
Count_Click - number of sperm whale clicks detected
Count_Bin - number of 5-min bins with sperm whale detections
Effort_Bin - number of 5-min bins with recording effort
Effort_Sec - number of seconds with recording effort
Max_Effort_Bin - maximum number of 5-min bins
Max_Effort_Sec - maximum number of seconds
SocialGroup_Bin - number of 5-min bins categorized as Social Groups
MidSize_Bin - number of 5-min bins categorized as Mid-Size
AdultMale_Bin - number of 5-min bins categorized as Adult Male
Site - which site does the data...