Map of cetaceans in France: where to watch them?

More than 25 cetacean species occur in French waters (mainland and overseas). This interactive map shows you, area by area, which species you can hope to encounter, in which season, and with which accredited operators. Click on an area to see the details.

This map brings together the cetacean sightings made at sea in mainland French waters and their approaches, as released by the major monitoring programmes. It shows neither strandings nor collection specimens: only animals seen, or heard, alive and at sea.

How to read this map

The most important point fits into one sentence: this is a map of survey effort as much as of the presence of the animals. A dark cell may mean that no cetacean has been seen there, or that nobody has ever looked.

The strongest concentrations bear this out. The busiest cell corresponds to a fixed acoustic station, whose detections all fall in the same place. The high densities in the eastern English Channel come from the monitoring campaigns for offshore wind projects, where effort is intense over a small area. These are not biodiversity hotspots.

For a complementary reading, corrected for effort, our page on the modelled distribution of cetaceans presents the model outputs of the DCSMM assessment, which estimate a probability of presence rather than a number of sightings.

What was set aside, and why

Of the 282,762 cetacean records GBIF holds within this footprint, a substantial share does not come from observation at sea.

Set aside	Volume	Reason
National stranding network	31,723	these are strandings, mapped on our dedicated map
Habitats Directive reporting	65,221	a regulatory 10 by 10 km grid, not individual sightings
Specimens and fossils	1,463	collections, skeletons, samples
Points falling on land	12,434	residual strandings and shore-based sightings, in datasets that are not meant to hold them

Reporting under the Habitats Directive deserved an explicit decision. These are summary data produced for the European Commission on a grid 10 kilometres on a side. Displaying them as sighting points would have drawn an artificial grid and suggested a precision that does not exist.

The most decisive filter remains the last one. No selection by source guarantees that a point lies at sea: any dataset may contain an animal seen from the shore or stranded. Each position is therefore tested for membership of the French coastline polygons, and 12,434 points were set aside on that basis, 8% of the total.

Where to watch, in practice

The map says where cetaceans have been seen, not where you will see them. To prepare a trip, our pages on when to watch, global hotspots and watching in the Mediterranean are more useful, as is the directory of accredited operators.

This map counts sightings; it does not say which species occur where. For that, the list of marine mammals of France gives, seaboard by seaboard and including the overseas territories, the status of each species and the number of records behind it.