NEFSC Aerial Survey - Experimental 2002

NOAA Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC)

The survey was conducted on the NOAA DeHavilland Twin Otter DHC-6, Series 300 aircraft from 19 July to 16 August 2002. The flights were based out of Otis Airbase from 19 July to 2 August 2002, and based out of Hancock County/Bar Harbor Airport in Trenton, Maine from 2 August to 16 August 2002. The southern border of the study area was south of Long Island, New York, the northern border was in the Bay of Fundy north of St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, the western border was the United States coastline, and the eastern border was about 64.5 deg W (west of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada).

The primary objective of this survey is to determine the feasibility of the circle-back method that estimates abundance of cetaceans and turtles, which includes an estimate of g(0), the probability of detecting a group on the track line. First, the practical issues of conducting the survey in the field will be assessed, and then the analytical issues will be investigated after the data are collected. The secondary objective is to estimate the abundance of animals using this new method. The third objective is to collect sea surface temperature information during the survey to be used to describe the habitat of the different cetacean and turtle species.

3/8/06: Data correction - sightings of humpback whale were mistakenly linked to Balaenidae (180531) and are now linked to Megaptera novaeangliae (180530).

In addition to the sighting data, effort data were recorded every half hour or whenever conditions changed. This dataset, therefore, should be used with the effort data.

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
cruise	Cruise ID
year	Year of observation
month	Month of observation
day	Day of observation
time	Time of the observation (local time)
lat	Latitude of observation
long	Longitude of observation
species	Species observed
sizeb	Number of animals
transect	Transect ID
leg	Leg ID
blank	kept blank
geom	Geometry field added by OBIS-SEAMAP
oid	Unique ID number (generated by OBIS-SEAMAP)