Twenty years of sightings 1993 – 2013.

In 2014 we celebrate 25 years of the Song of the Whale research programme, so to mark this momentous year, we have collated all of the observations of marine mammals we have made in the last two decades in order to identify those areas and species with specific conservation needs. At first glance, this map highlights the patchiness of marine wildlife and the dynamic nature of the world’s oceans. No two marine ecosystems are alike and thus we can see that regions of high productivity, such as Iceland and the volcanic outcrops of the Azores and the Canary Islands, have numerous cetacean visitors. Other regions support less biomass, leading to a corresponding dearth of sightings in the Baltic Sea and eastern Mediterranean Sea for example. Long-term monitoring such as this allows us to prioritise our research efforts. (The map above shows sighting groups by species aggregation).  Click on the map for a closer look.