GREC Cetacean Sightings 1996-2002

Groupe de Recherche sur les Cétacés and Alexandre Gannier

This set of data was obtained mainly with a 37 foot sailboat, with the help of many observers from Groupe de Recherche sur les Cétacés, most of the time coming from France mainland for the purpose of doing the survey. Alexandre Gannier has always been on board, director of the survey. Professor Claude Payri, Université de la Polynésie Française, has helped the project throughout the period.

In addition to Groupe de Recherche sur les Cétacés, a few funds were sometimes contributed to the project:
- Délégation à la Recherche (Polynésie Française)
- Marineland (France)

The data on Steno bredanensis was used by Ms. Kristi West, for the completion of one chapter of her PhD (University of Hawaii).

The purpose was to get baseline geo-referenced results on the general biogeography of the region. A specific project was run to study the humpback whale songs on a long term basis.

There are acoustic complementary data covering several species, with the humpback whale as a focus from 1997 to 2006.

Data were used in papers published in Aquatic Mammals (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006), Pacific Science, and JMBA.

Overview

This section explains attributes included in the original dataset. OBIS-SEAMAP restricts the attributes available to the public to date/time, lat/lon and species names/counts only. Should you need other attributes described here, you are encouraged to contact the data provider.

Attributes described below represent those in the original dataset provided by the provider.
Only minimum required attributes are visible and downloadable online. Other attributes may be obtained upon provider's permission.

Attributes in dataset

Attribute (table column)	Description
oid	Unique ID number (generated by OBIS-SEAMAP)
specie	definition not provided
sp_obs	Species name by provider
sp_tsn	Taxonomic Serial Number added by OBIS-SEAMAP
obs_date	Date
obs_time	Time. No second part provided
obs_count	Group size
latitude	Latitude in decimal degrees
longitude	Longitude in decimal degrees
beaufort	Beaufort Sea State (integer)
min_dist	Minimal distance between the observer and the cetacean school (in m, 1 m is set for bow riding)
geom	Geometry field added by OBIS-SEAMAP