BattyCoda: A novel open-source software for bat call annotation and classification.

The field of acoustic communication needs tools that facilitate the annotation and labeling of animal calls. Bat acoustic libraries gathered over the past few decades have primarily focused on compiling echolocation calls, which have been leveraged to develop machine learning algorithms capable of classifying bat species. However, because these classification methods require large training datasets, they have not yet been generalized to classify types of bat communication calls. Communication call repertoires in bats are wide, and distinct syllables occur with varying frequency, with some call types being recorded only rarely. Furthermore, collecting Classification communication calls poses greater technical challenges, making these calls more difficult to capture reliably. Here, we present BattyCoda, an open-access, customizable tool to categorize and label bat communication call types within the repertoire of a species using small training datasets (tens to hundreds of labeled calls). In this work, we compiled an initial training dataset of 11 types of big brown bat (