Quantifying spatial and temporal variation of North Pacific fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) acoustic behavior

In order to help develop hypotheses of connectivity among North Pacific fin whales, we examine recordings from 10 regions collected in the spring and fall. We develop a Random Forest model to classify fin whale note types that avoids manual note classification errors. We also present a method that objectively quantifies the note and pattern composition of recordings. We find that fin whale recordings near Hawaii have distinctive patterns,...