Whale log - observations from ANARE voyages 1991-1997

Ship-based observations of whales sightings from the original 'ANARE Whale Log' books have been recovered into a single repository of sightings. ANARE (Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions) is the historic acronym for these voyages.Currently there are data from 4 voyages, from the 1990's.Further data will be entered from existing Whale log datasheets on an ongoing basis.Observing platforms currently only include the ship, Aurora Australis.The quality and quantity of abiotic data associated with observations such as air temperature, sea ice cover etc vary immensely from voyage to voyage. Where possible these data have been entered.This dataset contains no information on estimates of survey effort and cannot be used to derive useful presence/absence spatial coverages of species during this period. It is purely sighting data only.Species distribution data are made available to SCAR-MarBIN (http://www.scarmarbin.be), OBIS and GBIF via the DiGIR protocol and Darwin Core schema.