SWFSC Marine Mammal Survey, Vaquita 1997, Cruise 1608

Marine Mammal and Turtle Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NMFS, NOAA

The 1998 Vaquita Abudance Survey was a collaboration between the National Marine Fisheries Service and SEMARNAP’s Instituto Nacional de la Pesca (INP) of Mexico. This line-transect survey was designed to collect data to estimate the abundance of vaquita, or Gulf of California harbor porpoise. The study area was from the northern end of the Gulf of California south to about 30 degrees north latitude in waters less than 100 meters deep. This survey was conducted by the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center aboard the NOAA ship David Starr Jordan for a total of 1,560 kilometers surveyed from mid-August to mid-September 1997. This dataset provides the time-date and geographical coordinates, by species/stock, of all cetaceans detected during the survey, as well as the daily and intra-daily start and end points of the line-transect survey.

The primary objective was to collect data to estimate the abundance vaquita, or Gulf of California harbor porpoise.

This dataset is supplemental to the following datasets:
SWFSC Marine Mammal Survey, Vaquita 2008, Cruise 1637

Overview

This section explains attributes included in the original dataset. OBIS-SEAMAP restricts the attributes available to the public to date/time, lat/lon and species names/counts only. Should you need other attributes described here, you are encouraged to contact the data provider.

Attributes described below represent those in the original dataset provided by the provider.
All attributes are included in the downloadable file (CSV or ESRI File Geodatabase) for "Complete Set of Dataset".

Attributes in dataset

Attribute (table column)	Description
oid	Unique ID number (generated by OBIS-SEAMAP)
cruise	Cruise No
obs_date	Date of the sighting
obs_time	Time of the sighting (local time zone)
sighting_no	Sighting No.
species_org	Species code in original format
sp_obs	Species code recorded
sp_tsn	Taxonomic Serial Number added by OBIS-SEAMAP
latitude	Latitude in decimal degrees
longitude	Longitude in decimal degrees
obs_count	Group size
geom	Geometry field added by OBIS-SEAMAP