Identifying subspecies of Warbling Vireo through spectrogram analysis of birdsong

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Chloe Riesen-Savard
  • Richard Hedley
  • Erin Bayne

• 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.

• Date created

  2021-08-01

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Alberta contact zone
  • Vireo gilvus gilvus
  • Vireo gilvus swainsoni
  • bioacoustic analysis
  • Xeno-canto
  • Warbling Vireos
  • gilvus subspecies
  • swainsoni subspecies
  • Vireo gilvus brewsteri subspecies
  • WISEST
  • STEM SRP
  • Science
  • Biological Sciences

• Type of Item

  Conference/Workshop Poster

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-wc04-6t09

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International