PIROP Northwest Atlantic 1965-1992
Canadian Wildlife Service

Falk Huettmann and John W. Chardine, Canadian Wildlife Service

The PIROP (Programme Intégré de recherches sur les oiseaux pélagiques) dataset, Atlantic subset, consists of georeferenced vessel-based surveys to monitor pelagic seabirds. Most surveys were carried out by R.G.B. Brown from 'vessels of opportunity' supplied by the Bedford Institute for Oceanography (BIO) in Dartmouth/Halifax, but many other platforms and observers were used, too. During these surveys, observations of other species other than seabirds were also recorded, e.g., waterfowl, waterbirds, songbirds, raptors, owls, sea mammals, and other information of interest (weather, oceanography, vessel activities, bird behavior, etc.). The data collection period covers all seasons of 1966-1992, with most surveys being conducted between (late) summers of 1975-1987. The survey protocol originally consisted of unlimited width 10 min transects, but was changed approximately 1984 towards a fixed-width strip transect type of survey. However, data and results from the PIROP database need to be interpreted as relative, and not absolute, abundance.

The PIROP data were collected for Canadian seabird monitoring purposes, focusing on the Canadian Atlantic, but also on other areas relevant to Canadian birds such as waters off Peru, off West Africa and off Europe.

The PIROP dataset is a large pool of seabird data, which got extended and modified over the years, due to changes of objectives and staff. Around 1998, the data were merged by CWS-Dartmouth office with the Manomet Bird Observatory Seabird database, which cover mostly the Gulf of Maine region.

The following references, and those available in the References section, refer to the PIROP database and present an overview about the structure, application and value of the data:
• Brown, R.G.B. 1967. Sea birds off Halifax. Canadian Field-Naturalist 81:276-8.
• Brown, R.G.B. 1970. Fulmar distribution: a Canadian perspective. Ibis 111:44-51.
• Brown, R.G.B. 1971. PIROP Instruction Manual. Canadian Wildlife Service, Dartmouth.
• Brown, R.G.B. 1973. Transatlantic migration of fulmars from the European Arctic. Canadian Field-Naturalist 87:312-3.
• Brown, R.G.B. 1977. Atlas of eastern Canadian seabirds, Supplement 1 Halifax-Bermuda transects. Canadian Wildlife Service, Ottawa.
• Brown, R.G.B. 1979. Seabirds of the Senegal upwelling and adjacent waters. Ibis 121:283-92.
• Brown, R.G.B. 1984. Seabirds in the Greenland, Barents and Norwegian Seas, February-April 1982. Polar Research 2:1-18.
• Brown, R.G.B. 1986. Revised atlas of eastern Canadian seabirds. Bedford Institute of Oceanography: Canadian Wildlife Service, Ottawa.
• Brown, R.G.B. 1988. The wing-moult of fulmars and shearwaters (Procellariidae) in Canadian Atlantic waters. Canadian Field-Naturalist 102:203-8.
• Brown, R.G.B. 1991. Marine birds and climatic warming in the northwest Atlantic. In: W.A. Montevecchi and A.J. Gaston (Eds.) Studies of high-latitude seabirds. 1. Behavioural, energetic, and oceanographic aspects of seabird feeding ecology. Volume Occasional Paper Number 1968. Canadian Wildlife Service, Ottawa.
• Brown, R.G.B and D.N. Nettleship. 1983. Seabird distribution studies. (Bedford Institute of Oceanography BIO Review '83). Canadian Wildlife Service, Ottawa.
• Diamond, A.W. 1985. A computer model of the energy demands of the seabirds of eastern and arctic Canada. Volume Final Report. Canadian Wildlife Service, Ottawa.
• Diamond, A.W., A.J. Gaston and R.G.B. Brown. 1993. Studies of high-latitude seabirds. 3. A model of the energy demands of the seabirds of eastern Arctic Canada Montevecchi WA, ed. Occasional Paper Number 77. Canadian Wildlife Service, Ottawa.
• Germain, P., R.G.B. Brown and C.E. Tull. 1973. Autumn seabird distribution in Canadian Arctic and Greenland waters. Studies on Northern Seabirds. Manuscript Report.
• Huettmann, F. 1997. TraPirp2: SQL PIROP import codes from ASCII Text into dBASE format. ACWERN (Atlantic Cooperative Wildlife Ecology Research Network), Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada.
• Huettmann, F. 2000. Environmental determination of seabird distribution in the northwest Atlantic. Atlantic Cooperative Ecology Wildlife Research Network (ACWERN). University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, N.B., Canada.
• Huettmann, F. 2000. Making use of public large-scale environmental databases from the WWW and a GIS for georeferenced prediction modelling: A research application using generalized linear models, classification and regression trees and neural networks. In: K. Tochtermann and W.-F. Riekert (Eds.) Hypermedia im Umweltschutz Proceedings of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) and Forschungsinstitut für anwendungsorientierte Wissensverarbeitung (FAW) Ulm. Umwelt-Informatik aktuell; Bd.24, Metropolis Verlag/Marburg. pp. 308-312.
• Huettmann, F. 2000. Seabird migration in the Canadian North Atlantic: moulting locations and movement patterns of immatures. Canadian Journal of Zoology 33:1-25. Huettmann, F. and T. Lock. 1997. A new software system for the PIROP database: data flow and an approach for a seabird-depth analysis. ICES Journal of Marine Science 54:518-23.
• Huettmann, F. and A.W. Diamond. 2001. Using PCA Scores to classify species communities: an example using seabird classifications at sea. Journal for Applied Statistics 28:843-853.
• Huettmann, F. and A.W. Diamond. 2001. Seabird colony locations and environmental determination of seabird distribution: A spatially explicit seabird breeding model in the northwest Atlantic. Ecological Modelling 141: 261-298.
• King, W.B., G.E. Watson and P.J. Gould. 1967. An application of automatic data processing to the study of the world ocean. Proceedings of the U.S. National Museum. 123, No 3609.
• Lock, A.R., R.G.B. Brown and S.H. Gerriets. 1994. Gazetteer of marine birds in Atlantic Canada. Canadian Wildlife Service, Dartmouth NS Canada.

Data correction: Puffinus creatopus (Pink-footed Shearwater; ITIS: 174547) observed on 1982-08-16 12:00:00 at 53.9000:-55.5000 (id=151664) changed to Procellariidae (Shearwaters; ITIS: 174532) as P. creatopus does not occur in the Atlantic.

Brown, R.G.B., D.N. Nettleship, P. Germain, C.E. Tull and T. Davis. 1975. Atlas of eastern Canadian seabirds. Canadian Wildlife Service, Ottawa

Diamond, A. W., A.J. Gaston and R.G.B. Brown. 1986. Converting PIROP counts of seabirds at sea to absolute densities. Progress Notes. No. 164. 21 pp

Huettmann, F. 1998. An ecological GIS research application for the northern Atlantic - The PIROP database software, environmental data sets and the role of the internet/WWW. W.-F. Riekert and K. Tochtermann (Eds.) Hypermedia im Umweltschutz Proceedings of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) and Forschungsinstitut für anwendungsorientierte Wissensverarbeitung (FAW) Ulm. Umwelt-Informatik aktuell; Bd.17, Metropolis Verlag. 213-217

Overview

Attributes described below represent those in the original dataset provided by the provider.
Only minimum required attributes are visible and downlodable online. Other attributes may be obtained upon provider's permission unless otherwise noteded below.

Attributes in dataset provided

Attribute (table column)	Description
tsn	Taxonomic Serial Number defined by ITIS.
common	Species common name.
scientific	Species scientific name.
rank