Species-level classification of beaked whale echolocation signals detected in the northern Gulf of Mexico.

This study presents and evaluates several methods for automated species-level classification of echolocation clicks from three beaked whale species recorded in the northern Gulf of Mexico. The species included are Cuvier's and Gervais' beaked whales, as well as an unknown species denoted Beaked Whale Gulf. An optimal feature set for discriminating the three click types while also separating detected clicks from unidentified delphinids was determined using supervised step-wise discriminant analysis.