Name: CETUS: Cetacean monitoring surveys in the Eastern North Atlantic
License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 4.0 License

The CETUS dataset contains effort-based occurrence records collected during a cetacean monitoring programme in the Eastern North Atlantic, since 2012. The CETUS dataset contains data collected within the CETUS Project (www.cetusproject.com), a cetacean monitoring programme in the Eastern North Atlantic, running since 2012. The project is led by the Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research (CIIMAR - University of Porto, Portugal), in partnership with TRANSINSULAR - Grupo ETE, a Portuguese company for maritime transport, that offers its cargo ships to be used as a platforms of opportunity to monitor cetaceans along routes between Continental Portugal and Madeira, Azores, Canary and Cape Verde islands. On-board trained marine mammal observers collect data on: survey effort, cetacean and other megafauna occurrences, as well as marine traffic and meteorological conditions. Data is provided in the recent OBIS-ENV-DATA format, and comprises 8913 georeferenced positions associated with 3195 occurrences of 44 marine taxa.

Citation

Correia, A.M., Oliveira-Rodrigues, C., M. Silva, I., Gandra, M., Liberal, M., Valente, R., Gil, A., Rosso, M., Pierce, G.J. & Sousa-Pinto, I., CIIMAR - UP. (2022). CETUS: Cetacean monitoring surveys in the Eastern North Atlantic. Marine Data Archive.

Published

November 25, 2025 at 09:10

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC) 4.0 License

URL

http://ipt.vliz.be/eurobis/resource?r=cetus_cetaceans

Archive

https://ipt.vliz.be/eurobis/archive.do?r=cetus_cetaceans

Contacts

Ana Mafalda Correia
CIIMAR/CIMAR LA, Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research, University of Porto

Miguel Gandra
CIIMAR/CIMAR LA, Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research, University of Porto

Marcos Liberal
Fraunhofer AICOS

Raul Valente
CIIMAR/CIMAR LA, Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research, University of Porto

Iolanda M. Silva
CIIMAR/CIMAR LA, Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research, University of Porto

18,307

total submitted occurrences

18,307

accepted occurrences

179,575

measurements and facts

taxa

species

Taxa

Missing and invalid fields

Field	Missing	Invalid
maximumDepthInMeters	15,821		86.4%
minimumDepthInMeters	15,821		86.4%

Quality flags

The OBIS data quality flags are documented at https://github.com/iobis/obis-qc.

Flag	Dropped	Records
NO_DEPTH		15,821	86.4%
ON_LAND		23	0.1%

CETUS: Cetacean monitoring surveys in the Eastern North Atlantic

Taxa

Missing and invalid fields

Quality flags

Measurement types

DNA derived data