Intra‐season variations in distribution and abundance of humpback whales in the West Antarctic Peninsula using cruise vessels as opportunistic platforms

Following the near collapse of several whale populations in the Southern Ocean, some baleen whale stocks are on the rise again. Combined with the recent increase in fishery of Antarctic Krill (Euphausiia superba) around the Western Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) there is a growing need to quantify several aspects of some of these whale species in this area. In this study we use data collected from tourist vessels performing several trips during the Austral summer to quantify the beginning of the foraging season for Antarctic Humpback whales, estimate abundance, as well as use predictive habitat model to identify potential areas for interaction between this species and fishing vessels.

The following dataset includes the GPS track of both vessels and all marine mammal and seabird observations collected on two ships between late November 2019 and mid-January 2020. These data were gathered following standard Distance Sampling protocols, recorded in Logger2010 software (http://www.marineconservationresearch.co.uk/downloads/logger-2000-rainbowclick-software-downloads/), stored in MS Access database files and subset in .RData files for analysis.