Methodology:

Beluga whales were manually detected by scanning VHR satellite imagery obtained from the Maxar satellites WorldView-2 and -3. Single points were placed on the whales, and the attribute table was filled out to contain information on the certainty level (i.e. "definite", "probable", "possible") derived from the classification score assessed based on various criteria (i.e. body length, body width, body shape, body colour, fluke print, blow, contour, wake, after-breach, defecation, other disturbance, fluke, flipper, head callosities and mud trail), following Cubaynes et al. 2023. For additional details on attribute table definitions, please refer to the README affiliated with the shapefile data. For each annotated whale, there is information about the imagery analysed: the location, latitude and longitude (in decimal degrees and recorded using the same geographic coordinate system and projection as the satellite imagery), imagery ID, imagery date, type of satellite, spatial resolution, number of multispectral bands, product level and type (e.g., Standard2A). The 4th of July dataset is in the projection WGS 1984 UTM 41N and 9th of July dataset in WGS 1984 UTM 42N.

Data quality:

The satellite images were pansharpened using the ESRI pansharpening algorithm.

The attribute table includes fields to: specify the satellite image metadata; describe environmental conditions; describe the observed animal. Please refer to the README associated with the data for details.