Locations of features of interest from a multi-season (2018-2022) baleen whale-focused survey of Wilhelmina Bay, Western Antarctic Peninsula, using WorldView-03 satellite imagery

The application of Very-High-Resolution satellite imagery for the purpose of studying wildlife, particularly in remote regions, has gained significant traction in recent years. With this there has been an exponential increase in the volume of data, which has fostered a shift towards the use of automated systems to increase processing efficiency. However, these systems require manually annotated data on which to be trained, which is lacking. This dataset describes a total of 819 annotated and classified whale Features of Interest (FOIs) from a multi-season survey of Wilhelmina Bay on the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). These data are comprised of FOIs that have been annotated and classified based on existing protocols by seven individual observers who scanned ~1,900 km2 of WorldView-03 imagery acquired between 2018/2019 and 2021/2022.

This work was supported by an Innovation Voucher from the British Antarctic Survey and grants from the World Wildlife Fund (GB107301) and NC-International NERC (NE/T012439/1).