Identifying subspecies of Warbling Vireo through spectrogram analysis of birdsong

Abstract

Description

Based on recent evidence of genetic differentiation in the Alberta contact zone of the Warbling Vireo, an ~85km stretch of land in Barrhead County, we sought to classify the Eastern subspecies (Vireo gilvus gilvus) and Western subspecies (Vireo gilvus swainsoni) through bioacoustic analysis. Our lab collected data from the open-source sound recording database, Xeno-canto, to identify qualitative and quantitative differences in subspecies song of Warbling Vireos outside of Alberta. A companion project then used this information to determine where in Alberta, eastern and western subspecies were found. I used the software RavenLite to annotate sound spectrograms of Warbling Vireo (hereafter, WAVI) songs across 126 locations in North America. Results revealed significant variation in song characteristic bench markers — such as song length, mean frequency, and number of notes — between the gilvus and swainsoni subspecies, as well as a third subspecies Vireo gilvus brewsteri.

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http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6670

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en

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