When Big Data Becomes a Curse: Spatial Heterogeneity and the Limits of Learning from Passive Acoustic Monitoring Data

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arXiv:2609.26125v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Passive Acoustic Monitoring produces large archives whose recordings are clustered by deployment, season, station identifier, and acquisition configuration. We analyze 908,072 AIS-labeled 679-second recordings from 38 deployments, 20 Atlantic Canadian station identifiers, and 21 receiver positions. The AIS-contact prior varies by more than 200-fold, and per-deployment screening distributions require local interpretation. Bidirectional cross-season transfer over the 18 station identifiers observed in both seasons predicts station identity above the 5.56% uniform-chance level, with balanced accuracy of 15.9% for AIS-contact and 16.4% for no-AIS-contact recordings. The same descriptors predict the two hydrophone models at 74.1% and 85.6% balanced accuracy, respectively, but hydrophone model is strongly confounded with season and other deployment-level acquisition differences. On a retrospectively screened and capped benchmark of 54m507 recordings, repeated station-grouped holdout yields an ROC-AUC of 0.612 with a station-bootstrap 95% interval of 0.582 to 0.648, compared with 0.661 under a random-window diagnostic. Their paired difference is 0.049 (0.040 to 0.056). Removing raw energy changes unseen-station ROC-AUC from 0.612 to 0.603, while an exploratory training-station scale analysis is non-monotonic. These results show that random-window validation overstates transfer to unseen station identifiers in this corpus. They support dependence-aware validation and broader independent spatial sampling, while spatial-expert models remain a hypothesis rather than an established remedy.