Data Licensing

The WhaleMap.world website (“WhaleMap”) displays a mixture of:

• User-submitted whale sightings
• Externally sourced biodiversity data
• Manually curated observations

Licensing of External Data

Certain whale occurrence records shown on WhaleMap originate from:

GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Licensed under CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Source: https://www.gbif.org/

OBIS — Ocean Biodiversity Information System
Licensed under CC-BY 4.0.
Source: https://obis.org/

These datasets remain under their original licenses. They may require attribution if reused outside this site.

User-Submitted Sightings

By submitting a sighting on WhaleMap, you agree that:

• Your submission is shared under CC-BY 4.0.
• You grant WhaleMap permission to store, display, and redistribute the data with proper attribution.
• You confirm you only submit material you have the right to share.

Website Data Aggregation

WhaleMap may combine user submissions with publicly licensed datasets. The resulting combined dataset is also considered CC-BY 4.0, with explicit attribution preserved for each source.

icon attributions