Original provider: Wildlife Conservation Society

Dataset credits: Wildlife Conservation Society

Abstract: The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has digitally captured the Townsend Whaling Charts that were published as a series of 4 charts with the article titled "The distribution of certain whales as shown by logbook records of American whale ships" by Charles Haskins Townsend in the journal Zoologica in 1935. The 4 charts show the locations of over 50,000 captures of 4 whale species; sperm whales (36,908), right whales (8,415), humpback whales (2,883) and bowhead whales (5,114). Capture locations were transcribed from North American (“Yankee”) pelagic whale vessel log books dating from 1761 to 1920 and plotted onto nautical charts in a Mercator projection by a cartographer. Each point plotted on the charts represents the location of a whaling ship on a day when one or more whales were taken and is symbolized by month of the year using a combination of color and open and closed circles. Townsend and his cartographer plotted vessel locations as accurately as possible according to log book records. When plotting locations on an earlier sperm whale chart published in 1931 the cartographer spaced points where locations were very dense, "extending areas slightly" for a number of whaling grounds. However, for charts in preparation at this time, Townsend states that "this difficulty is avoided by omitting some of the data, rather than extend the ground beyond actual whaling limits." We assumed that this statement refers to the 1935 charts but there is still some question as to whether the cartographer did in fact space locations and thus expand whaling grounds.

Purpose: This dataset provides point features that represent the historical locations of right whale catches taken by North American pelagic whaling vessels between 1761 to 1920. Points were derived from 4 charts that were first scanned on a large format scanner at a resolution of 200 dpi. The charts were then georeferenced in the native projection of the charts, the Mercator projection, using GIS software (ESRI ArcView 3.2). Each vessel capture location plotted on the charts was then digitized as a point feature and attributed with the month of capture. One GIS file (ESRI shapefile) was then created for each whale species represented by the charts; sperm whale, right whale, humpback whale and bowhead whale.

Digitizing errors include missed points, particularly from areas of dense chart locations, and incorrect assignment of month of capture because of difficulty distinguishing between chart colors. However to limit these errors multiple checks of digitized and chart locations were made and color enhancements of chart scans were used to ensure correct month assignments. Overall we are confident that at least 95% of catch locations have been digitized and that at least 95% of month attributes are correct.

For full resolution digital copies of the Townsend charts please contact Gillian Woolmer (gwoolmer@wcs.org).

Supplemental information: [2023-01-31] The year of the date was changed from 1913 to 1849, the midpoint of the time range of the data.

WCS digitized the Townsend whaling charts in 2002 using ArcView 3.2 from ESRI. The information WCS has captured for each point location is the whale species (based on the chart) and the month, based on the chart point symbol. Exact dates and number of whales taken was not possible to determine. Right whale captures were separated into northern and southern right whale species, based on their geographic location.

Since time, count, day, and year were not available, "00:00:00," 1, 1, and 1913 were used, respectively. Only month is available.

FRUC Datasets (Forest environment dataset)

This dataset was collected as part of the work conducted by the Forestry Robotics @ University of Coimbra team (https://www.youtube.com/@forestryroboticsuc; part of the Institute of Systems and Robotics, https://www.isr.uc.pt/) within the scope of the Safety, Exploration and Maintenance of Forests with Ecological Robotics (SEMFIRE, ref. CENTRO-01-0247-FEDER-03269; http://semfire.ingeniarius.pt/) and the Semi-Autonomous Robotic System for Forest Cleaning and Fire Prevention (SafeForest, CENTRO-01-0247-FEDER-045931) research projects. Its purpose is to allow researchers in forestry robotics to have an in-depth analysis of a florests environment; obtain an a priori map for robot operations (e.g. path plannning, landscaping, etc…) and to train segmentation algorithms;

The dataset in question includes data from multiple sensors and absolute, map-referenced localization which can be used to register the sensor data to a fixed coordinate system. It was collected at the Choupal National Woods, Coimbra, Portugal (40◦13′13.3′′N;8◦26′38.1′′W). The dataset was collected during a partly clouded day in a forest environment by performing two circular loop laps amounting to a total distance of approximately 800m, with a total duration of 14 minutes and 22 seconds. The scenario is rich in features relevant to forestry robotics applications, including trees, bushes, tree trunks, etc. To better handle the multimodal nature of the acquired data, the dataset is bundled into rosbags, a file format used by the ROS (Robot Operating System) to record and play back data.

More specifically, the datasets include:

RGB Images from an Intel Realsense D435i

Aligned Depth Images from an Intel Realsense D435i

Left and Right Mono Images from a Mynt Eye s1030

Point Clouds from a Livox Mid-70 LiDAR

Unfiltered acceleration, gyroscopic and magnetic data from a Xsens MTi IMU

Unfiltered acceleration, gyroscopic data from an Intel Realsense D435i

GNSS Fix data from a Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 device

Description of files:

The dataset is contain in choupal.bag.

The rosbag_info.txt contains the information of each rosbag;

The sensor_box.urdf contains all the required transforms;

The sensor_box.stl contains the 3D model of the apparatus;

The choupal.launch publishes the sensor transforms and plays the dataset;

The localization.bag contains the final graph of poses extracted with Cartographer republished as nav_msgs/odom at 4.98Hz.

The localization_15Hz.bag contains a map-referenced localization extracted with Cartographer at a higher frequency, but the poses are interpolated. If you don't require a high frame rate, please use the localization.bag instead.

Usage:

Extract the fruc_dataset_choupal_launch.zip into a catkin workspace

Install the necessary dependencies of the package:

cd [/path/to/catkin_ws]

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -y -r

Copy the rosbags into the fruc_dataset_choupal_launch/rosbag/

Edit the fruc_dataset_choupal_launch/launch/choupal.launch file to your use case:

Change the file_path argument if the rosbags are not in the default location;

Set localization_file to the path of the desired localization bag, leave it empty to run the dataset without localization.

Compile the package and source the environment:

catkin_make [/your_catkin_workspace/]

source [/your_catkin_workspace/devel/setup.bash]

Launch the files:

roslaunch fruc_dataset_choupal_launch choupal.launch