The dataset Records of the Harbour Porpoise in the Finnish Region from 1828 to 1975 contains research material compiled in the research project entitled Memories of Porpoises: The shared past of humans and porpoises in the Finnish sea area. The project aimed to investigate the shared past of humans and harbour porpoises in the Finnish region from the nineteenth century onwards. The material was collected mainly from Finnish and Swedish newspapers and periodicals published in Finland and digitised by the National Library of Finland (https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.fi/etusivu?set_language=en). From this material, we found a total of 413 records of harbour porpoises from the period 1828–1975. More detailed information on the collection of the material, including related details and challenges, can be found in the research article published by the project on the basis of this dataset: “Records of the Harbour Porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) in the Finnish Region based on the Digitised Press Data” (https://doi.org/10.60910/ber2026.31fx-as25).  

The project Memories of Porpoises: The shared past of humans and porpoises in the Finnish sea area was funded by the Weisell Foundation (2022–2025) and led by Otto Latva.

The CSV file below contains 17 columns in the following order:

1. Sea area
2. Municipality / City
3. LAT
4. LON
5. More specific place (e.g. village or bay)
6. Location mentioned in the Source
7. Date of the Encounter
8. Language of the Source
9. HELCOM/ASCOBANS database (before 2026)
10. Date of the Source
11. The Source (Newspaper or Magazine)
12. The Name Used for Harbour Porpoise in the Source
13. Length mentioned in the source
14. Weight mentioned in the source
15. The number of porpoises
16. Nature of the Encounter
17. URL