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SMUCC: Monitoring diving and space-use by harbour seals across the Irish Sea region to better understand behaviour, and identify and mitigate interactions with anthropogenic activities.
Citation
Jessopp, M., Cox, SL., 2020. Monitoring diving and space-use by harbour seals across the Irish Sea region to better understand behaviour, and identify and mitigate interactions with anthropogenic activities. https://marineinfo.org/id/dataset/7935

Availability: Creative Commons License This dataset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Description
we focus on tracking the behaviours and distributions of rehabilitated juvenile harbour seals, that may be particularly vulnerable to disturbance from human interference. Using Fastloc technology, which requires less than 1 second at the surface to obtain a fix, tags were programmed to record a location roughly every 15 minutes, subsequently providing high resolution data on seal movements. Tags also had an inbuilt time-depth recorder, programmed to log summarised dive events. Together this information was transmitted by the GSM mobile phone network when a seal came within range. This data is/was collected as part of the INTERREG funded SeaMonitor project, with an aim to better understand the dive behaviour, movements, space use (alongside interactions with anthropogenic activities), and survival of rehabilitated juvenile harbour seals from Northern Ireland. more

Telemetry studies are a useful tool for assessing potential interactions between marine biota and anthropogenic activities. For seals, that are exposed to multiple threats stemming from, for example, aquaculture and commercial fisheries alongside specifically noise-generating activities such as shipping, oil and gas exploration and marine contraction projects, GPS-GSM tags can be used to track movements in near-real time across large spatial extents for a period of several months. This information can then be used to assess interactions between seals and these potentially impactful anthropogenic activities. Here, we focus on tracking the behaviours and distributions of rehabilitated juvenile harbour seals, that may be particularly vulnerable to disturbance from human interference. Using Fastloc technology, which requires less than 1 second at the surface to obtain a fix, tags were programmed to record a location roughly every 15 minutes, subsequently providing high resolution data on seal movements. Tags also had an inbuilt time-depth recorder, programmed to log summarised dive events (summarised using a broken-stick algorithm to 10 inflexion points including the maximum depth). Together this information was transmitted by the GSM mobile phone network when a seal came within range. This data is/was collected as part of the INTERREG funded SeaMonitor project, with an aim to better understand the dive behaviour, movements, space use (alongside interactions with anthropogenic activities), and survival of rehabilitated juvenile harbour seals from Northern Ireland.

Scope
Themes:
Biology, Biology > Acoustics, Biology > Ecology - biodiversity, Biology > Mammals
Keywords:
Marine/Coastal, Acoustic data, Acoustic telemetry, Acoustic Telemetry, Acoustic tracking, Animal movement, Anthropogenic factors, Depth measurement, Harbour seals, Marine mammals, Noise pollution, Rehabilitation, Space utilization, Tags, ANE, British Isles, Northern Ireland, Down, Phoca vitulina Linnaeus, 1758, Pinnipedia

Geographical coverage
ANE, British Isles, Northern Ireland, Down Stations [Marine Regions]
Portaferry
Coordinates: MinLong: -5,6; MinLat: 54,35 - MaxLong: -5,51; MaxLat: 54,4 [WGS84]

Temporal coverage
1 October 2019 - 31 December 2022

Taxonomic coverage
Phoca vitulina Linnaeus, 1758 [WoRMS]
Pinnipedia [WoRMS]

Parameter
Detections Methodology
Detections: Acoustic telemetry

Related datasets
Parent dataset:
European Tracking Network (ETN) data, more

Project
SeaMonitor, more


Dataset status: In Progress
Data type: Data
Data origin: Research: field survey
Metadatarecord created: 2021-12-02
Information last updated: 2024-01-30
All data in the Integrated Marine Information System (IMIS) is subject to the VLIZ privacy policy