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Quantitative Acoustic Differentiation Of Cryptic Species Illustrated With King And Clapper Rails, Lydia L. Stiffler, Katie M. Schroeder, James T. Anderson, Susan B. Mcrae, Todd E. Katzner

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Reliable species identification is vital for survey and monitoring programs. Recently, the development of digital technology for recording and analyzing vocalizations has assisted in acoustic surveying for cryptic, rare, or elusive species. However, the quan- titative tools that exist for species differentiation are still being refined. Using vocali- zations recorded in the course of ecological studies of a King Rail (Rallus elegans) and a Clapper Rail (Rallus crepitans) population, we assessed the accuracy and effective- ness of three parametric (logistic regression, discriminant function analysis, quadratic discriminant function analysis) and six nonparametric (support vector machine, CART, Random Forest, k-nearest neighbor, weighted …