BLM CETAP SHIP Sightings

University of Rhode Island
Bureau of Land Management
US Dept of the Interior

The Cetacean and Turtle Assessment Program (CETAP) was sponsored by the Bureau of Land Management and conducted between October 1978 and January 1982 by the University of Rhode Island in outer continental shelf waters of the northeastern United States from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, to the Gulf of Maine and from shore to 9.3 km (5 nautical miles) seaward of the 1829 m (1000 fathoms) isobath. Population surveys were conducted by CETAP to assess the distribution and abundance of whales, dolphins and sea turtles inhabiting the study area.

This dataset is a subset of CETAP sightings, extracting opportunistic sighting records, with the addition of taxonomic information of species sighted. The full dataset may be available upon request. Requests for more data, further details on the dataset, proper use of the dataset, and questions should be directed to the primary contact person.

[2020-09-30] The following invalid species names were corrected according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS).
Turtles: Testudines (173749) => Testudines (948936)

Sighting points that are more than 2 km inland were eliminated. Sightings located from 1 km to 2 km inland can be considered as on-water sightings. Those points have TRUE in [Excluded] field to indicate that they seem to fall on land but may be correct sightings.

Metadata are in progress.

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
dataset	Dataset ID
lineno	Line number
fileid	File ID
platform	Platform
obsdate	Date of the observation
obstime	Time of the observation (local time)
month	Month
day	Day
year	Year
stime	Time in the original string format
lat	Latitude in decimal degrees
lon	Longitude in decimal degrees
eventno	Event No.
legtype	Leg type
legstage	Leg stage
heading	Heading
cloud	Cloud
viz	Vizibility
beaufort	Beaufort Sea state
sightno	Sighting No
speccode	Species code
scientific	Scientific name
common	Common name
tsn	ITIS Taxonomic Serial Number added by OBIS-SEAMAP
rank	Taxonomic rank
idrel	Species identification reliability
number	Group size
confidnc	definition not provided
dead	Dead or alive
excluded	For internal use
geom	Geometry field added by OBIS-SEAMAP
oid	Unique ID number (generated by OBIS-SEAMAP)