Offshore seabird monitoring program

Offshore petroleum activities have been ongoing since the 1970s in eastern Canada, a zone which supports a rich and diverse assemblage of seabirds. Seabirds are extremely vulnerable to oiling and in November 2004 an important crude oil spill occurred off the shore of Newfoundland. At that time there was no information on seabird abundance to determine the effects of the spill and a study was funded by the Environmental Studies Research Funds (ESRF) to quantify seabird abundance and distribution in areas of offshore petroleum activities in eastern Canada. A novel protocol was used under this project and over 2500 hours of observation were conducted on 50,000 km of ocean transect over a 3.5 year period. The relationship between survey intensity and the precision of density estimates is presented herein and recommendations are made for increasing the precision of the estimates. This paper recommends continued survey efforts in production areas to maintain data precision.