The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is a data aggregator for biodiversity data. The big advantage of using an aggregator like GBIF over getting data directly from the original data source is that an aggregator provides a single point of entry to many data sets, so analysing one data set is technically interoperable with any other data set.
Spectrograms are a common visualization of sound data. Visualizing sound data can be useful when doing a presentation or for publication. Additionally, machine learning algorithms for classifying sound data generally use spectrograms as their starting point, instead of the sound data itself, as many advanced algorithnms for classifying images are readily available. The example uses the R packages warbleR (Araya-Salas & Smith-Vidaurre, 2017), seewave (Sueur, Aubin, Simonis, 2008) and tuneR (Ligges et al., 2018).
This example draws the spectrogram of the call of a tawny owl (Strix aluco).
For a project on noise pollution in the oceans at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, I recently made this plot of the hearing and vocalization ranges of selected marine animals. Range plots are generally not-so-common plots. In this example, I plotted the hearing and vocalization range (frequency) for several species of whales, dolphins, seals, turtles and fishes.
If you are using R, then you are probably familiar with the mtcars data set, that is used in many R tutorials. The “car analogy” is so common in text books, that this so-called technique has its own Wikipedia page. For the rest of us, who don’t understand anything about motor cars, R-core comes with a wide selection of example data sets, some of which relate to ecology or biodiversity.