Whaling data rescue

In 1948, the USSR began a 30-year campaign of illegal whaling that is estimated to have resulted in almost 180,000 unreported catches worldwide. The true catch totals have now been reconstructed for the North Pacific using formerly secret Soviet whaling industry and other reports discovered in Russian archives. However, while the catch total revisions have provided a broad overview of Soviet whaling, the reports contain data on the dates, locations and other characteristics of thousands of catches and sightings from across the North Pacific, including many records from non-whaling scientific surveys conducted in months rarely covered by whaling data. Together, these data have the potential to prove extremely useful in studies of the distribution, status and population structure of large whales in the North Pacific, and to assist in the planning of future surveys. Here, we propose to extract such data from the hard copy paper reports and selected other sources and enter them into an easily accessible electronic database; the database will be submitted to NPRB and the International Whaling Commission, and will be made freely available to other researchers.