Ship-based observations of birds, seals and whales from the original 'ANARE Bird Log' books have been recovered into a single repository of sightings and associated abiotic information. ANARE (Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions) is the historic acronym for these voyages. A few voyages have been included that were not part of ANARE but have Australian observers or volunteer observers. Voyages start from the 1947/48 austral season up to 1982/83 with an average of 3 voyages per season. There are a few voyages where there is no data. It is not known if either no bird observations were undertaken during this period or that the bird logs exist if observations were undertaken. Current counts are birds, seals and whales Observing platforms include the following ships - Wyatt Earp, Tottan, River Fitzroy, Norsel, Kista Dan, Thala Dan, Magga Dan, Nella Dan, Lady Franklin and Nanok S and a single voyage from the private yacht Solo. The quality and quantity of abiotic data associated with observations such as air temperature, sea ice cover etc vary immensely from voyage to voyage. Where possible this data has been entered. This dataset contains very little information on estimates of survey effort and cannot be used to derive useful presence/absence spatial coverages of species during this period. It is purely sighting data only.

Between 1954 and 1975, iceberg observations were collected on Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE) by Antarctic expeditioners on a volunteer basis as they travelled to and from Antarctica. No fixed format for data collection had been determined, and many of the observations recorded are in diary format. The data have not been converted to electronic form, and are available only in the original logbooks held at the National Archives Office.

The documents available for downloading are: A scanned copy of a notebook from data collection/analysis Two annotated copies of a typed list detailing the contents of the stomachs of bird species from Heard Island Iles de Kerguelen. Some correspondence is also included with the stomach content lists. The typed lists refer to data collected in 1950, whereas the notebook refers to data collected in 1951.

Ship-based observations of whales sightings from the original 'ANARE Whale Log' books have been recovered into a single repository of sightings. ANARE (Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions) is the historic acronym for these voyages. Currently there are data from 4 voyages, from the 1990's. Further data will be entered from existing Whale log datasheets on an ongoing basis. Observing platforms currently only include the ship, Aurora Australis. The quality and quantity of abiotic data associated with observations such as air temperature, sea ice cover etc vary immensely from voyage to voyage. Where possible these data have been entered. This dataset contains no information on estimates of survey effort and cannot be used to derive useful presence/absence spatial coverages of species during this period. It is purely sighting data only. Species distribution data are made available to SCAR-MarBIN (http://www.scarmarbin.be), OBIS and GBIF via the DiGIR protocol and Darwin Core schema.