Analysing vocal similarity of little owls using warbleR in R

Question

I am struggling a bit with an analysis I need to do. I have collected data consisting of little owl calls that were recorded along transects. I want to analyse these recordings for similarity, in order to see which recorded calls are from the same owls and which are from different owls. In that way I can make an estimate of the size of the population at my study area.

I have done a bit of research and it seems that the package warbleR seems to be suitable for this. However, I am far from an R expert and am struggling a bit with how to go about this. Do any of you have experience with these types of analyses and maybe have example scripts? It seems to me that I could use the function cross_correlation and maybe make a pca, however in the warbleR vignette I looked at they only do this for different types of calls and not for the same type call from different individuals, so I am not sure if it would work.

Answer 1

to be able to run analyses with warbleR you need to input the data using the "selection_table" format. Take a look at the example data "lbh_selec_table" to get a sense of the format:

library(warbleR)

data(lbh_selec_table)

head(lbh_selec_table)

The whole point of these objects is to tell R the time location in your sound files (in seconds) of the signals you want to analyze. Take a look at this link for more details on this object structure and how to import it into R.