Cetacean Sightings Survey and Southern Ocean cetacean program

Metadata record for data from ASAC Project 915 and 2253 See the link below for public details on these projects.

Our cetacean research is conducted on multidisciplinary cruises aimed at investigating environmental change and ecosystem effects. Our research approach now integrates broad scale acoustic monitoring with fine scale ecology experiments during annual surveys with AMLR. These data will allow us to connect fine scale variability with regional and circum-Antarctic processes, and eventually to understand how the dynamics of the Antarctic ecosystem and environmental change might affect the recovery of whale populations. The BROKE WEST multidisciplinary survey to be held in the 2005/2006 season will provide a large-scale simultaneously collected dataset within which to analyse the cetacean distribution, ecological and acoustic data.

These sightings were made on Australian Antarctic Division voyages. For further information about these voyages, see the URL given below. Codes provided in the download file for voyage come in two formats:

V70102 - Voyage 7 of the 2001/2002 season KK0102 - Use of the Kapitan Khlebnikov by the Australian Antarctic Division in the 2001/2002 season.

The download file will include an excel spreadsheet of sightings, resightings and incidental sightings, as well as an explanatory word document. For further details on methods used, and an explanation of the types of data collected, see the above mentioned word document.

These data were collected as part of ASAC projects 915 and 2253 (ASAC_915 and ASAC_2253).

The fields in this dataset are:

Voyage Data Logger (Logger/Wincruz) Date Time Observer Method Bearing Distance (nautical miles) Swim Direction Near Ice Species Reaction Group Size Latitude Longitude