Bahamas Marine Mammal Research Organisation Opportunistic Sightings

Bahamas Marine Mammal Research Organisation

BMMRO has been conducting a long-term study documenting the occurrence, distribution, and abundance of marine mammals around the islands of The Bahamas since 1991. Currently based in Sandy Point on Great Abaco Island, this project provides the only comprehensive documentation of marine mammal fauna in this part of the world.


The dataset presented here includes only marine mammal sightings, and other sea turtle sightings and marine mammal strandings and sightings are included in separate datasets in OBIS-SEAMAP. The dataset presented here is a subset of marine mammal sightings between 1988 and 2011, including sightings reported from the public. The dataset also is a subset of BMMRO vessel encounters with marine mammals between 1991 and 2011, comprising 20 different species, with the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin representing 60% of all encounters. The entire dataset includes stranding records between 1944 and 2011. In addition, the entire dataset includes sightings of turtles comprising 3 different species between 1991 and 2011.


A sighting is when our vessel was unable to close in on the group of animals while an encounter is when closing was successful and photographs / video recording of the animals were obtained. The dataset includes off-transect sightings and encounters (opportunistic).

N/A

Please use this dataset along with off-transect tracklines. Note that the original ship location data were recorded every minute. Tracklines up to 2006 were constructed using locations every five minutes to reduce the data size; tracklines constructed for 2006-2011 used data recorded every minute. Tracklines that intersected land were excluded. On-transect sightings and encounters are provided in a different dataset.


8/15/2011: This dataset was updated to include data collected from 2006 to 2008. Data from 2006-2008 did not include group size estimates and "1" was used to be conservative. Effort transects are only available for 3/11/1997-10/1/2008.


06/12/2013: This dataset was updated to include group size estimate data collected from 2006-2008 and sightings/effort data for 2008-2011. When records did not include group size estimates or time, "1" was used to be conservative, and 00:00:00 was used, respectively.


8/8/2013: Effort tracklines that crossed land were excluded and updated, as well as records that had incorrect time values. Shapefile and csv files were updated.

Overview

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 (created by OBIS-SEAMAP)
totalrecno
dataset
lineno
dateest
dategmt
encseq
sightingsq
sp_obs	Species Observed
spcode	Species code
sp_tsn	Species ITIS TSN
spsci	Scientific name of species observed
gsize	Original group size estimated
obs_count	Total number of animals observed
timeest
begtime
endtime
area
transect
timegmt
time2
lat_s
lon_s
latitude	Observed latitude
longitude	Observed longitude
watertemp	Temperature (Celsius)
depth	Depth (meters)
cloudcover
beaufort
vessel
excluded
notes	Notes for when time was not available and "00:00:00" was filled and when counts were not available "1" was filled
datetime_gmt
datetime
convert
timezone