At-Sea Observations of Seabirds 1969 to 1990, Tasman Sea, New Zealand and Australian waters

OBIS and OBIS Australia

This is a dataset of at-sea observations of seabirds dating from 1969 to 1990.
The data was recorded using guidelines for the Australasian Seabird Mapping Scheme and counts seabirds seen from a ship during a 10 minute period. The data includes geolocations of the sightings, bird species, numbers and behaviour, observer and ship name, and observation date and time.
It has been built from data elements extracted by Te Papa staff from the at-sea bird observations recorded in the logbooks of Captain John Arthur Francis Jenkins (1928-1989) and count cards held by the convenor of the Australasian Seabird Mapping Scheme. Metadata record is https://catalogue.data.govt.nz/dataset/at-sea-observations-of-seabirds-1969-to-1990
The logbooks of Captain Jenkins are held by the Archives of the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

N/A

This dataset was downloaded from OBIS (https://obis.org/). The records for only marine mammals, seabirds, sea turtles and rays and sharks were extracted. Records with no longitude/latitude or no date (eventDate) were excluded.
OBIS dataset page:
https://obis.org/dataset/29ea15ed-8f76-40ca-bd14-58c62e10b2ef
Data Provider's dataset page:
http://ogc-act.csiro.au/ipt/resource?r=asms_nz

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	Internal ID
id	Record ID
dataset_id	Dataset ID
scientificname	Scientific name
vernacularname	Vernacular name
aphiaid	Aphia ID
taxonrank	taxononic rank
individualcount	Group size / individual count
eventdate	Event date (precision varies)
eventtime	Event time
decimallatitude	Latitude in decimal degrees
decimallongitude	Longitude in decimal degrees
coordinateprecision	Coordinate precision
catalognumber	Catalog number
collectioncode	Collection code
occurrencestatus	Occurrence status
basisofrecord	Basis of record (HumanObservation / MachineObservation)
modified	Date/time the record was modified
node_id	Node ID
occurrenceid	Occurrence ID
occurrenceremarks	Occurrence remarks
eventid	Event ID
institutioncode	Institution code
lifestage	Life stage
sex	Gender of the animal if known
species	Species by provider
datasetid	Dataset ID by provider
country	Country
locality	Location of ocean
waterbody	Details of ocean
dropped	Flag indicating the record was dropped (always false)
absence	Flag indicating the record represents the absence of the species (always false)
marine	Flag indicating the record is for marine life (always true)