USWTR Onslow Bay Aerial Survey -Right side- 2008-2010

William A. McLellan, University of North Carolina Wilmington

The protected species monitoring program, initiated in response to Onslow Bay, North Carolina, United States being identified as a potential site for the United States Navy’s Undersea Warfare Training Range (USWTR), is now into its third year. To estimate marine mammal density, distribution, and seasonality, a multi-platform approach was implemented using traditional visual line transect survey methods from aerial and vessel platforms along with passive acoustic monitoring from vessels and moored instruments. This project represents a long term data set used to assess residency and abundance patterns of this offshore area in the waters off North Carolina.

To estimate marine mammal density, distribution, and seasonality, a multi-platform approach was implemented using traditional visual line transect survey methods from aerial and vessel platforms along with passive acoustic monitoring from vessels and moored instruments.

The original survey data are separated into two datasets, from left and right observers. This dataset is from the right side sightings data. The left side sightings data are available on OBIS-SEAMAP in the USWTR Onslow Bay Aerial Survey -Left side- 2008-2010 dataset.

This dataset includes a subset of the data collection for the Onlsow Aerial surveys.
Other data of the collection are available in the following datasets:
USWTR Onslow Bay Aerial Survey -Right side- 2010-2011
USWTR Onslow Bay Aerial Survey -Left side- 2010-2011
USWTR Onslow Bay Aerial Survey -Left side- 2008-2010
UNCW Aerial Surveys for monitoring of proposed Onslow Bay USWTR site - Left side -
UNCW Aerial Surveys for monitoring of proposed Onslow Bay USWTR site - Right side -

All the US Navy-funded survey datasets are found in the OBIS-SEAMAP US Navy page.

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 SEAMAP)
id	Row ID assigned by OBIS-SEAMAP
obs_date	date of observation
latitude	Latitude in decimal degrees
obs_time	time of observation
way_point	way point
longitude	Longitude in decimal degrees
event	Event. 1.1 = On effort/on track; 1.2 = Off effort. Full codes are available upon request.
heading	Heading
track_no	Track Number
observer	Observer Number
vizability	Visibility
bss	BSS
cloud	Cloud
angle_out	Verticale angle
glare_l	Glare Left
glare_r	Glare Right
degree_forward	Horizontal angle
reliability	Reliability
sighting_cue	Sighting Cue
species	species observed in provider-specific codes
num_min	Min number of animals
num_max	Maximum number of animals
obs_count	best estimate of number of animals
comments	Comments
sp_tsn	ITIS taxonomic serial number. This field added by OBIS-SEAMAP