Virginia CZM Wind Energy Area Survey- Left side - January 2014 through March 2016

Virginia Aquarium Foundation - Sarah D. Mallette, Gwen G. Lockhart, Susan G. Barco
University of North Carolina Wilmington - William A. McLellan, Ryan J. McAlarney Erin W. Cummings and D. Ann Pabst

The data provided were collected as part of the Documenting Whale Migration off Virginia's Coast for Use in Marine Spatial Planning project - funded by the Virginia Coastal Zone Management Program Grant Section 306 Environmental Enhancement Program Strategy Project of Special Merit.

NA14NOS4190141 Jan 2014 - March 2016

Aerial surveys were conducted under NOAA Scientific Permits No. 948-1692-00 and 16473, held by UNCW.

On November 1, 2013, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced Dominion Virginia Power was the provisional winner of the commercial lease area offshore of Virginia (VA WEA). Development of off shore wind energy poses potential threats to marine mammals, including direct effects (i.e.vessel interactions, collision and entanglement with structures, displacement, avoidance, or injury due to noise from construction or operations) and indirect threats (i.e. effects on prey species, increased risk of fishery and vessel interaction through displacement out of the WEA) (BOEM 2012). This information is important to mitigate the potentially harmful impacts from ocean development, shipping, and other anthropogenic activities. To address these existing data gaps, we have collected marine mammal and sea turtle sighting data from aerial surveys conducted off the coast of Virginia from November 2012 to December 2016.

The sightings are split into the left and right sides. The sightings from the right side are available in http://seamap.env.duke.edu/dataset/1375

Opportunistic sightings (eventcode=10.0) are not included.

Effort data (tracklines) are available upon request and permission from the provider.

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.
Only minimum required attributes are visible and downloadable online. Other attributes may be obtained upon provider's permission.

Attributes in dataset

Attribute (table column)	Description
oid	Unique ID number (generated by OBIS-SEAMAP)
objectid	Unique ID number
month	Month of the sighting
waypoint	Waypoint number generated by GPS
latitude	Latitude in decimal degrees
longitude	Longitude in decimal degrees
heading	Heading
track	Track number
observer	Observer left or right
bss	sea state
cloud	Cloud cover code
glarel	Glare Left code
glarer	Glare Right code
angleout	Vertical angle is given in rough increments of 20 degrees with 1 being directly on the trackline and 4 being anything outside of survey wide to horiz
sightingcue	Sighting cue code
species	Species name recorded
reliability	Reliability code
min_count	Minimum number of animals
max_count	Maximum number of animals
best_count	Best estimate of number of animals
comments	Comments about sighting
visibility	Visibility code
eventcode	Event code
degreeforward	Degree forward is given assuming the nose of the plane is 0 degrees and directly off the wing is 90 degrees – measurements are taken from 1-180 on each side of the plane
datetime	observation date time in Eastern Standard Time
contract	Funding Source
tsn	Taxonomic Serial Number added by OBIS-SEAMAP
datetime_ini	Internal use
latitude_ini	Internal use
longitude_ini	Internal use
geom	Geometry field added by OBIS-SEAMAP