Inshore boat-based cetacean Survey 2011

Published by: Department of Housing, Local Government, and Heritage

Licensed under: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Category: Environment

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Concurrent visual and acoustic surveys for cetaceans were carried out in two survey blocks in the Irish Sea to investigate species distribution, relative abundance and absolute abundance where possible.

Single platform line-transect surveys were carried out in the northern Irish Sea in July and in the southern Irish Sea in August 2011. During the two surveys, we carried out 348km of survey effort along 23 track-lines of which 100% of the northern Irish Sea survey and 79% of the southern Irish Sea survey were in sea-state ≤3. We recorded a total of 71 cetacean sightings comprising 111 individuals of two species. In addition there were five seal sightings of two species and a single sighting of a basking shark. Harbour porpoise was by far the most abundant species followed by minke whale. Grey seal was the most frequent seal species with only a single sighting of a common seal.

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Theme	Environment
Date released	2022-07-08
Date updated	2023-11-20
Dataset conforms to these standards	The INSPIRE Directive or INSPIRE lays down a general framework for a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for the purposes of European Community environmental policies and policies or activities which may have an impact on the environment.
Rights notes	{http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/,"Copyright Government of Ireland. This dataset was created by National Parks and Wildlife Service, Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. This copyright material is licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",otherRestrictions}
Update frequency	Other
Language	English
Geographic coverage in GeoJSON format	{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-10.650444030762, 50.807923689449],[-10.650444030762, 55.993470564449], [-5.289115905762, 55.993470564449], [-5.289115905762, 50.807923689449], [-10.650444030762, 50.807923689449]]]}
Spatial Reference Systems (SRS)	WGS 84 (EPSG:4326)
Vertical Extent	{"verticalDomainName": "EPSG Projection 5731 - Malin Head height", "minVerticalExtent": "0", "maxVerticalExtent": "1014"}
Provenance information	During each transect the position of the survey vessel was tracked continuously through a GPS receiver fed directly into a laptop while survey effort, including environmental conditions (sea-state, wind strength and direction, glare etc.) were recorded directly onto LOGGER software (IFAW) every 15 minutes. When a sighting was made the position of the vessel was recorded immediately in LOGGER and the angle of the sighting from the track of the vessel and the radial distance of the sighting from the vessel recorded. The angle was recorded to the nearest degree via an angle board attached to the vessel immediately in front of each observer. These data were communicated to the recorder in the wheelhouse via two-way radio. Accurate distance estimation is essential for distance sampling. Distance sticks were made for observers using the Heinemann Equation (Heinemann, 1981) which were used to aid distance estimation.
Period of time covered (begin)	2011-07-01
Period of time covered (end)	2011-12-01