Digitized records of Soviet whaling catch and sighting, 1933-2018, North Pacific

This dataset contains available records of cetacean sightings and catches made over a long period (1933-2018), by Soviet whalers and scientists. With data on location, date, species, and number of animals. In 1948, the USSR began a 30-year campaign of illegal whaling that is estimated to have resulted in almost 180,000 unreported catches worldwide. The true catch totals have now been reconstructed for the North Pacific using Soviet whaling industry reports discovered in Russian archives. However, while the catch revisions have provided a broad overview of Soviet whaling, the reports contain data on the dates, locations and other characteristics of thousands of catches and sightings from across the North Pacific. In addition, there are many records in reports from non-whaling scientific surveys, including some conducted in months rarely covered by whaling data. Together, these data have the potential to prove useful in studies of the distribution, status and population structure of large whales in the North Pacific, and to assist in the planning of future surveys. In a project supported by the North Pacific Research Board (NPRB), we have extracted such data from the hard copy paper reports and entered them into an electronic database. Here, we describe the database, which contains 32,801 records (representing a minimum of 93,302 whales identified to species) digitized from the original hard copy files. The database will be made available to NPRB and the International Whaling Commission on an open-access basis. This dataset was generated under NPRB project 1726.

本数据集收录了苏联捕鲸者与科研人员在1933年至2018年的长期观测中记录的鲸目（Cetacea）目击与捕获数据，数据包含观测地点、日期、物种及个体数量等信息。1948年，苏联启动了为期30年的非法捕鲸行动，据估算全球范围内因此有近18万头鲸未被上报捕获量。目前，研究人员已借助在俄罗斯档案馆中发现的苏联捕鲸行业报告，重构了北太平洋海域的真实捕获总量。尽管捕获量修正工作已为苏联捕鲸活动勾勒出宏观全貌，但这些报告还收录了北太平洋全域数千次捕获与目击事件的日期、地点及其他特征数据，此外还有大量非捕鲸类科研调查的记录——其中部分调查的开展月份罕有捕鲸数据覆盖。综合上述数据，其可用于北太平洋海域大型鲸类的分布、种群现状及种群结构研究，同时可为未来的调查规划提供支撑。在北太平洋研究委员会（North Pacific Research Board, NPRB）资助的项目中，研究团队从纸质原始报告中提取了此类数据，并录入电子数据库。该数据库共收录32801条记录，对应至少93302头经物种鉴定的鲸类个体，将以开放获取的形式向北太平洋研究委员会及国际捕鲸委员会提供。本数据集由NPRB项目1726资助生成。