Visual observations recorded during the New Zealand Australian Antarctic Ecosystems Voyage 2015

The ‘Logger’ data entry system was developed by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and is a flexible system to record information during a voyage. All events occurring during daylight operations such as sightings, biopsy attempts and sonobuoy deployments were recorded in a customized data entry program Logger along with weather and effort data.The logger access database contains all data collected throughout the NZ/Aus Antarctic Ecosystems Voyage 2015 related to:Biopsy events (date/time in UTC, success, sample number, reaction, attempts, dart recovery, notes)Comments - time stamped (UTC) with GPS index providing additional detail Observer effort (effort status, event, number of observers and locations, ship guide and data logger)Environmental observations (sightability, sea state, swell, weather, cloud cover, visibility, intensity, glare, ice, sea surface temperature)GPS data - time indexed NMEA feed, also containing heading and ship speedLookup - table containing topic codes describing the codes that appear in all other tablesCetacean sightings and resightings (date/time in UTC), sighting number, sighting platform, estimate distance, binocular reticles, angle, species, sighting cue, heading, estimate of number of individuals, observer of sighting, behaviour, pod compaction, comments)Sonobuoy deployments (date/time in UTC, sonobuoy number, notes)