ME harbor and gray seals time series
University of Maine

NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center
James Gilbert, University of Maine
Wendy Dow, Duke University

Seal populations in the northwest Atlantic are thriving, yet few grant dollars go to seal projects in the northeast region. According to many researchers and managers in the region, the healthy state of stocks is exactly why we should be studying seals. Seal and human activities along the coast often result in conflicts, which will undoubtedly increase as the population and range of both seals and humans increase. The east coast of the United States lacks a management plan for seals. A problem that seriously impedes management is that managers do not know where the seals are and more specifically, where haul-out sites are. This atlas is designed to aid managers and researchers in the management and conservation of seals in the northwest Atlantic. The atlas and the data used to create the atlas can be accessed through OBIS-SEAMAP.

The purpose of this dataset and atlas is to provide data from a series of aerial surveys conducted between 1981 and 2001 of harbor and gray seal haul-out sites in Maine.

The original data were transposed so that each record represents seals abundance at a single ledge on a single day. As this dataset is a time-series, an appropriate way to represent it is to show it with time-series charts by region. Currently, OBIS-SEAMAP lets you see it on Google Earth with the charts. Not all seasons are represented in this dataset, and distributions of seals may be different in other seasons. Lack of a count for a ledge on a particular date does not necessarily mean the ledge was not observed.

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
id
ledge
region
longitude	Longitude of observation
latitude	Latitude of observation
survey_id
notes
oid	Unique ID number (generated by SEAMAP)