Karlee E Zammit, William D Halliday, Amalis Riera, Annika Heimrich, Mariana Barbosa, Nikoletta Diogou, Olokhaktomiut Hunters and Trappers Committee, Stephen J Insley, Fabio Frazao, Sebastien Fabbro, Stan E Dosso
Ringed seals (Pusa hispida) in the Arctic face habitat loss from climate change, making monitoring critical for conservation. Passive acoustic monitoring provides essential data; however, large data volumes require automated analysis. We developed a ResNet-based detector for ringed seal barks in passive acoustic recordings. The detector achieved F1 scores above 0.90 on development data and held-out datasets from different locations and recording periods. In continuous recordings, it maintained high recall (>0.90), with lower precision (∼0.5) reflecting a trade-off between detecting most vocalizations and false positives from acoustically similar non-target sounds. The open-source detector supports large-scale bioacoustic monitoring.