  Whales are an important part of the oceanic ecosystem. Although historic
commercial whale hunting a.k.a. whaling has severely threatened whale
populations, whale researchers are looking at historical whaling data to inform
current whale status and future conservation efforts. To facilitate this, we
worked with experts in aquatic and fishery sciences to create WhaleVis -- an
interactive dashboard for the commercial whaling dataset maintained by the
International Whaling Commission (IWC). We characterize key analysis tasks
among whale researchers for this database, most important of which is inferring
spatial distribution of whale populations over time. In addition to
facilitating analysis of whale catches based on the spatio-temporal attributes,
we use whaling expedition details to plot the search routes of expeditions. We
propose a model of the catch data as a graph, where nodes represent catch
locations, and edges represent whaling expedition routes. This model
facilitates visual estimation of whale search effort and in turn the spatial
distribution of whale populations normalized by the search effort -- a well
known problem in fisheries research. It further opens up new avenues for graph
analysis on the data, including more rigorous computation of spatial
distribution of whales normalized by the search effort, and enabling new
insight generation. We demonstrate the use of our dashboard through a real life
use case.
