A collection of fully-annotated soundscape recordings from the Northeastern United States

This collection contains 285 hour-long soundscape recordings, which have been annotated by expert ornithologists who provided 50,760 bounding box labels for 81 different bird species from the Northeastern USA. The data were recorded in 2017 in the Sapsucker Woods bird sanctuary in Ithaca, NY, USA. This collection has (partially) been featured as test data in the 2019, 2020 and 2021 BirdCLEF competition and can primarily be used for training and evaluation of machine learning algorithms. Data collection As part of the Sapsucker Woods Acoustic Monitoring Project (SWAMP), the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology deployed 30 first-generation SWIFT recorders in the surrounding bird sanctuary area in Ithaca, NY, USA. The sensitivity of the used microphones was -44 (+/-3) dB re 1 V/Pa. The microphone's frequency response was not measured, but is assumed to be flat (+/- 2 dB) in the frequency range 100 Hz to 7.5 kHz. The analog signal was amplified by 33 dB and digitized (16-bit resolution) using an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with a clipping level of -/+ 0.9 V. This ongoing study aims to investigate the vocal activity patterns and seasonally changing diversity of local bird species. The data are also used to assess the impact of noise pollution on the behavior of birds. Recordings were recorded 24 h/day in 1-hour uncompressed WAVE files at 48 kHz, converted to FLAC and resampled to 32 kHz for this collection. Parts of this dataset have previously been used in the 2019, 2020 and 2021 BirdCLEF competition. Sampling and annotation protocol We subsampled data for this collection by randomly selecting one 1-hour file from one of the 30 different recording units for each hour of one day per week between Feb and Aug 2017. For this collection, we excluded recordings that were shorter than one hour or did not contain a bird vocalization. Annotators were asked to box every bird call they could recognize, ignoring those that are too faint. Raven Pro software was used to annotate the data. Provided labels contain full bird calls that are boxed in time and frequency. Annotators were allowed to combine multiple consecutive calls of one species into one bounding box label if pauses between calls were shorter than five seconds. We use eBird species codes as labels, following the 2021 eBird taxonomy (Clements list). Files in this collection Audio recordings can be accessed by downloading and extracting the “soundscape_data.zip” file. Soundscape recording filenames contain a sequential file ID, recording date, and timestamp in UTC. As an example, the file “SSW_001_20170225_010000Z.flac” has sequential ID 001 and was recorded on Feb 25th, 2017 at 01:00:00 UTC. Ground truth annotations are listed in “annotations.csv” where each line specifies the corresponding filename, start and end time in seconds, low and high frequency in Hertz, and an eBird species code. These species codes can be assigned to scientific and common name of a species with the “species.csv” file. Unidentifiable calls have been marked with “????” and are included in the ground truth annotations. The approximate recording location with longitude and latitude can be found in the “recording_location.txt” file. Acknowledgements Compiling this extensive dataset was a major undertaking, and we are very thankful to the domain experts who helped to collect and manually annotate the data for this collection (individual contributors in alphabetic order): Jessie Barry, Sarah Dzielski, Cullen Hanks, W. Alexander Hopping, Robert Koch, Jim Lowe, Jay McGowan, Ashik Rahaman, Yu Shiu, Laurel Symes, and Matt Young. Version history Version 2: Unidentifiable calls have been marked with “????” and added as bounding box labels to the ground truth annotations. Version 1: Initial release.

本数据集包含285段时长为1小时的声景录音，由专业鸟类学家完成标注，共为美国东北部的81种鸟类提供了50760个边界框标签。数据于2017年在美国纽约州伊萨卡的吸木鸟森林鸟类保护区（Sapsucker Woods bird sanctuary）录制完成。该数据集曾部分作为测试数据用于2019、2020及2021年的BirdCLEF竞赛，主要可用于机器学习算法的训练与评估。

数据采集
作为吸木鸟森林声学监测项目（Sapsucker Woods Acoustic Monitoring Project, SWAMP）的一部分，康奈尔鸟类学实验室的K·丽莎·杨保护生物声学中心（K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology）在美国纽约州伊萨卡的周边鸟类保护区部署了30台初代SWIFT记录仪。所用麦克风的灵敏度为-44(±3) dB re 1 V/Pa。麦克风的频率响应未实测，但假设在100 Hz至7.5 kHz频段内为平坦响应（±2 dB）。模拟信号经33 dB放大后，通过模数转换器（analog-to-digital converter, ADC）以16位分辨率进行数字化，该转换器的削波电平为±0.9 V。此项持续性研究旨在探究本地鸟类的鸣唱活动模式与季节性物种多样性变化，同时也用于评估噪声污染对鸟类行为的影响。录音采用每日24小时不间断录制，生成48 kHz采样率的未压缩WAVE格式文件，每段时长1小时，本数据集已将其转换为FLAC格式并重采样至32 kHz。本数据集的部分内容此前已用于2019、2020及2021年的BirdCLEF竞赛。

采样与标注协议
本数据集的采样流程为：在2017年2月至8月期间，每周选取一天中的每个小时，从30台不同的录音设备中随机挑选一段1小时的录音文件。本数据集排除了时长不足1小时或未包含鸟类鸣唱的录音。标注人员需框选出所有可识别的鸟类鸣唱，忽略过于微弱的鸣唱。标注工作使用Raven Pro软件完成。所提供的标签为在时间与频率维度上框选的完整鸟类鸣唱。若同一物种的连续鸣唱之间的停顿短于5秒，标注人员可将其合并为一个边界框标签。本数据集采用遵循2021年eBird分类体系（Clements名录）的eBird物种代码作为标签。

文件说明
本数据集的音频录音可通过下载并解压"soundscape_data.zip"文件获取。声景录音的文件名包含顺序文件编号、录制日期与UTC时间戳。例如文件"SSW_001_20170225_010000Z.flac"的顺序编号为001，录制时间为2017年2月25日01:00:00 UTC。真实标注信息存储于"annotations.csv"文件中，每行内容对应文件名、以秒为单位的起始与结束时间、以赫兹为单位的低频与高频截止值，以及eBird物种代码。可通过"species.csv"文件将这些物种代码映射为物种的学名与通用名。无法识别的鸣唱已标记为"????"，并已纳入真实标注中。录制地点的经纬度近似值可在"recording_location.txt"文件中获取。

致谢
构建这一大型数据集是一项繁重的工作，我们衷心感谢协助收集并手动标注本数据集的领域专家（按字母顺序排列的贡献者）：Jessie Barry、Sarah Dzielski、Cullen Hanks、W. Alexander Hopping、Robert Koch、Jim Lowe、Jay McGowan、Ashik Rahaman、Yu Shiu、Laurel Symes与Matt Young。

版本历史
版本2：无法识别的鸣唱已标记为"????"，并作为边界框标签添加至真实标注中。版本1：初始发布版本。