DCLDE 2022 Silbido to Tethys

These subroutines can be used to convert information about DCLDE 2022 deployments and associated detections with the software package silbido to XML documents that can be ingested by Tethys.

For information about silbido see:

• Roch, M. A., Brandes, T. S., Patel, B., Barkley, Y., Baumann-Pickering, S. and Soldevilla, M. S. (2011). Automated extraction of odontocete whistle contours. *Journal of the Acoustical Society of America *130, 2212-23, doi:10.1121/1.3624821.

• Li, P., Liu, X., Palmer, K. J., Fleishman, E., Gillespie, D., Nosal, E.-M., Shiu , Y., Klinck, H., Cholewiak, D., Helble, T. et al. (2020). Learning Deep Models from Synthetic Data for Extracting Dolphin Whistle Contours. In Intl. Joint Conf. Neural Net., pp. 10. Glasgow, Scotland.

For information about Tethys, see the Tethys web siteTethys Metadata or

• Roch, M. A., Baumann-Pickering, S., Batchelor, H., Hwang, D., Sirovic, A., Hildebrand, J. A., Berchok, C. L., Cholewiak, D., Munger, L. M., Oleson, E. M. et al. (2013). Tethys: a workbench and database for passive acoustic metadata. Oceans 2013, 5 pp.
• Roch, M. A., Batchelor, H., Baumann-Pickering, S., Berchock, C. L., Cholewiak, D., Fujioka, E., Garland , E. C., Herbert, S., Hildebrand, J. A., Oleson, E. M. et al. (2016). Management of acoustic metadata for bioacoustics. Ecological Informatics 31, 122-136, doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2015.12.002.

Requirements

This code requires a recent version of Matlab, and Tethys's Nilus XML generator (Tethys version 3.0). In addition, it is assumed that the DCLDE metadata spreadsheets are available and that silbido has been used to create a set of annotation (detection) files.

There are a couple of hard-coded pathnames that will need to be adjusted prior to using this code. These are in dclde_deployments2xml.m and dclde_process_detections.m and are described in more detail below.

Usage

The function dclde_deployments2xml will create a set of deployment records suitable for use in Tethys. As the R/V Lasker and R/V Sette data have gaps in their records, these are broken up into mulitple deployments. We also downsample the array GPS information to one sample per minute. For localization, this is not ideal, but it significantly reduces the size of the GPS data that are stored in Tehtys and increases efficiency for most tasks. Note that we used a different version of the GPS than the one distributed with the data set, if you do not have access to this, change the variable complete_gps to false.

Function dclde_process_detections assumes that the detections are stored relative to the direcotry named in variable base_dir. Subdirectories 1705 and 1706 representing the arrays used on the R/V Lasker and R/V Sette respectively should be present. We group detections into sets of detection efforts based on duration and gaps. Any time there is a gap in the detection efffort of a minute or more, we start a new detection effort. As encounters with lots of whistle activity and cause the Java heap allocated by Matlab to exhaust itself, we also start new efforts every two hours. This does not affect the ability to represent things in Tethys.

Both of these functions will create a set of XML files that can be uploaded to Tethys using standard Tehtys upload techniques (see the Tethys manual for details).

Other

Several helper functions are included in this repository.

• dclde_detections2xml - Called by dclde_process_detections to generate the XML files.
• binary_search - Fast sorted array searching
• createSubclass - Helper function to overcome Matlab limitation that does not allow creation of nested subclasses.
• effort-diel - Not yet used
• audit_gps - identified issues with GPS tracks