Archive Overview
This is a cloud archive of 27,858 avian nocturnal flight calls (mostly warblers & sparrows) recorded in spring 2016 from seven acoustic monitoring stations in the Towns of Somerset & Yates, NY (Niagara & Orleans Counties, NY; see map). The archive is implemented in a limited functionality version of the open-source audio/spectrogram database program called Vesper. The archive can be viewed with Windows PCs using recent versions of Google Chrome (recommended), Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Edge browsers, but not Internet Explorer. It can be viewed via macOS with Google Chrome (recommended) or Mozilla Firefox browsers, but not Safari (Safari does not yet support some Web Audio API functionality that Vesper uses, but presumably will at some point.)

When first entering the archive, one sees a calendar of 2016 dates with orange circles on the nights with call data for the first of the seven acoustic stations. Nights span two dates and the date listed is that beginning at 00:00 hours (e.g., the night spanning 6-7 May is listed in the archive as 7 May). The size of the orange circle reflects the number of calls for that night; larger circles indicate more calls. Clicking on one of the orange circles in the calendar takes you to a call album for the circle's night, which in Vesper is termed a "clip album". The album contains a spectrogram for each call - a visual representation of the sound with time along the horizontal axis, frequency (or pitch, roughly) along the vertical axis, and the power at a particular time and frequency indicated as darkness. To listen to a call, move the mouse over its spectrogram and click the orange play button that appears in the spectrogram.

A call album is organized into pages, with each page containing the spectrograms of the next batch of calls in the night. One can navigate through the pages of a call album using the two small arrow buttons to the right of the album's title, or by typing the "<" and ">" characters on the keyboard. One can also navigate to a particular page of a call album via the "Go To Page..." item of the dropdown menu, which can be displayed by clicking on the rightmost button to the right of the album title. Below the call album title is a plot that shows the timing of call occurrences in the call album through the night (darkening gray tones equal civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight respectively; dark is night). The numbers labeling the plot are hours of the night, and the plot contains a vertical mark for each clip. The marks for the calls of the current page are magenta, and the marks of other clips are orange. One can navigate among the pages of a call album by clicking on the plot. As one moves the mouse over the plot the marks for the calls of the page under the mouse turn green; clicking the mouse leads to that page. To toggle the spectrogram labels of a call album, type the "~" (tilde) key on the keyboard.

In the calendar displays, the station and classification can be changed by clicking on the small filter button to the right of the page title. This brings up a "Filter Clips" modal that includes "Station/mic" for specifying the station and "Classification" for specifying the species classification. (It also includes a "Detector" option, but since the archive currently contains calls for only one detector there is only one choice.)