Development of Automated Whistle and Click Classifiers for Odontocete Species in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean and the Waters Surrounding the Hawaiian Islands

The primary objective of this effort is to develop combined automated whistle and click classifiers for odontocete species in the northwest Atlantic Ocean and the waters surrounding the Hawaiian Islands. We will also incorporate ancillary information (e.g. vocalization rate, relative abundance of whistles and clicks, latitude of acoustic encounter) about acoustic encounters into the classifiers in an effort to improve classification the performance. These classifiers will be implemented in an existing whistle classifier, known as the Real-time Odontocete Call Classification Algorithm (ROCCA). ROCCA currently is available to users as a module in the acoustic processing software platform, PAMGuard (Gillespie et al. 2008).