Baltic Porpoise Sightings 01-02

International Fund for Animal Welfare

Boat-based acoustic and visual surveys for harbor porpoises (Phocoena phocoena) were conducted during the summers of 2001 and 2002in order to investigate their distribution and relative abundance in the Baltic Sea, and to compare the results with the adjacent Kiel and Mecklenburg Bights and the Little Belt.

Harbor porpoises are subject to year-round bycatch in gillnets and other fishing gear in these waters. This is of particular concern in the Baltic Sea where a survey carried out in 1995 indicated that the population is low and current levels of anthropogenic mortality are believed to be unsustainable.

6/15/2010: The primary contact was changed from Douglas Gillespie to Anna Moscrop upon provider request.



3/28/2007: _obs_count (species count) field was blank. It is now filled with proper counts.



This dataset includes visual sightings events only.
Data for acoustic events during the survey are available in Baltic Porpoise Acoustic Surveys 01-02.
Acoustic sound files are not available in OBIS-SEAMAP.

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
dataset
lineno
incidental	Whether the sighting is incidental or not.Incidental sightings were recorded in 2001 only.
index
datetime
sightingno
latitude	Latitude of observation
longitude	Longitude of observation
gpsindex
gpstime
species	Species code
tsn	ITIS taxonomic serial number
scientific	Species scientific name
platform
distance
bearing
totalcount
calves
block
notes
heading
headingtyp
speed
speedtype
gpserror
datastatus
acoustic
aframeobs
mastobs
seastate
excluded
oid	Unique ID number (generated by SEAMAP)