DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10028773
title: Data and Code: Spatiotemporal Variability of Fin Whale and Blue Whale Calls Detected by Land Seismometers in the Lower St. Lawrence Seaway

description: Code

MATLABWhaleDetectionCodeNWA.zip

The code used in the manuscript Spatiotemporal Variability of Fin Whale and Blue Whale Calls Detected by Land Seismometers in the Lower St. Lawrence Seaway (Goblot et al., in review) to detect whale calls in seismic waveforms was written by Alexandre Plourde and uploaded here with permission. This .zip file contains 3 folders, ‘Numerical Methods’, ‘Signal Processing’ and ‘Whale Subroutines’, as well as 3 main scripts (x2 for fin and blue whales). 



Pre-processing:



Convert .mseed to SAC files and rename with the format: YYYY.MM.DD.NETWORK.STATION..CHANNEL.SAC. Each SAC file must then be placed in a folder named with the format YYYYMMDD, referred to as events (evs) in the code. Each of these folders must then be placed into a single folder known as the events directory (drE) in the code.






Processing: Fin whales



Run ‘RecordWhaleNoiseLSZ.m’ for fin whales. This reads through daily SAC files, and computes fin whale power ratio every 120 s. The folder ‘FinWhalePower’ (drP) should now be created. These contain text files with the power ratios (W) for every window at each station.

Run ‘createFinWhaleDectectionList.m' to check which 120s time windows have W > threshold (3.0 in our case). These time windows are stored in the matrix FWD.

Run 'RecordFinWhaleCallsLSZ.m' to identify individual whale calls within each of the 120s time segments in the FWD matrix. The labelled call times are stored in the matrix FWC.






Processing: Blue whales



Run ‘RecordBlueWhalesLSZ.m’ for fin whales. This reads through daily SAC files, and computes fin whale power ratio every 120 s. The folder ‘BlueWhalePower’ (drP) should now be created. These contain text files with the power ratios (W) for every window at each station.

Run ‘createBlueWhaleDectectionList.m' to check which 720s time windows have W > threshold (1.5 in our case). These time windows are stored in the matrix BWD.

Run 'RecordFinWhaleCallsLSZ.m' to identify individual whale calls within each of the 720s time segments in the BWD matrix. The labelled call times are stored in the matrix BWC.




Data

The whale detection code was applied to seismic waveform data downloaded through the EarthScope Consortium Web Services (https://service.iris.edu/), including the following seismic network: CN (Natural Resources Canada, 1975). All whale calls were detected using the characteristic reccurence interval method (MATLABWhaleDetectionCodeNWA.zip).

Table S2

WhaleDetectionsFeb2020Jan2022LSZ.mat



This dataset contains the center time of fin whale and blue whale detections and calls, from land 6 seismometers (CNQ, ICQ, SMQ, SNFQ, PMAQ, RISQ) in the Lower St-Lawrence Seaway between February 2020 and January 2022.



FWD_



Column 1: list of fin whale detections (2 minute time window with presence)

Column 2: corresponding station label



BWD_



Column 1: list of blue whale detections (12 minute time window with presence)

Column 2: corresponding station label



FWC_



Column 1: list of individual ~1s fin whale calls

Column 2: corresponding station label



BWC_



Column 1: list of individual ~8s blue whale calls

Column 2: corresponding station label



stadir: list of stations and labels (1-6)




Table S3

a) MonthlyBlueWhaleDetectionsOct2015Jan2022.csv and b) MonthlyFinWhaleDetectionsOct2015Jan2022.csv











Number of monthly a) fin whale detections and b) blue whale detections from October 2015 to January 2022. Empty cells indicate periods when stations were not operating. Quiet day detections are included.

Note the Oct 2015-Feb 2020 catalogue is from Plourde and Nedimović (2022) and includes up to 14 stations throughout this period from the following seismic networks: CN (Natural Resources Canada, 1975) and C8 (Natural Resources Canada, 2002). The Feb 2020-Jan 2022 catalogue is from Goblot et al. (in review) and includes the same stations from Table S1.






Additional

Movie S1

LSLSWhales.mp4



This movie contains an audiovisual representation of a series of fin whale calls and blue whale calls detected by 2 land seismometers in the Lower St-Lawrence Seaway. The fin whale detection was recorded by land seismometer CNQ (Côte-Nord) on Dec 12 2021 from 18:19:40 to 18:21:40. The blue whale detection was recorded by land seismometer SNFQ (Sainte-Félicité) on Aug 22 2021 from 05:36:00 to 05:48:00.

The MATLAB soundsc(x) function was applied to seismic waveform data with fin whale and a blue whale calls. The signal with the fin whale detection is bandpassed from 18-21 Hz and the blue whale signal is bandpassed from 16-18 Hz. These signals were sped up 1000x in order to make them audible.

The audio file was then uploaded to veed.io to produce a frequency response visualization of the whale calls.

More audiovisuals can be viewed here.