| Summary: | This dataset contains available records of cetacean sightings and catches made over a long period (1933-2018), by Soviet whalers and scientists. With data on location, date, species, and number of animals. 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 Soviet whaling industry reports discovered in Russian archives. However, while the catch 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. In addition, there are many records in reports from non-whaling scientific surveys, including some conducted in months rarely covered by whaling data. Together, these data have the potential to prove 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. In a project supported by the North Pacific Research Board (NPRB), we have extracted such data from the hard copy paper reports and entered them into an electronic database. Here, we describe the database, which contains 32,801 records (representing a minimum of 93,302 whales identified to species) digitized from the original hard copy files. The database will be made available to NPRB and the International Whaling Commission on an open-access basis. This dataset was generated under NPRB project 1726.
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