SalishSea.io Marine Mammal Occurrences
Sightings of whales and other marine mammals from April 2014 to today, as a Darwin Core Archive for biodiversity tools and a GeoParquet file for mapping tools. They are sightings reported on SalishSea.io and sightings reported to Whale Alert and shared through the Acartia data cooperative, by organizations such as Orca Network and Cascadia Research Collective. Killer whales are included from Monterey Bay to northern British Columbia; other animals from the Salish Sea alone.
Updated as new sightings arrive.
What it leaves out
iNaturalist observations, which iNaturalist publishes to GBIF itself, and with them nearly all the seals, sea lions and otters on the map. A sighting reported on SalishSea.io is included once its contributor has agreed to our terms of use.
License
Every record is CC BY 4.0: SalishSea.io's own sightings as their contributors grant under our terms of use, and the Whale Alert sightings as their contributors grant through the Acartia data cooperative. Each record's place is the name of a water region from our basemap, which contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada and the Open Government Licence – British Columbia.
Citing it
Give the day you downloaded it, because the archive changes as sightings arrive:
SalishSea.io (year). SalishSea.io Marine Mammal Occurrences (v1.3). Darwin Core Archive, version of date. https://salishsea.io/datasets/occurrences-v1
Each record names the organization it came through, such as Orca Network, in its datasetName.
When you use their records, credit those organizations as well.
What its fields mean
Data provenance and attribution says how each record gives its source, its observer and its license, and what is left out and why. Questions to rainhead@gmail.com.