Fine-scale harbour seal usage for informed marine spatial planning
Abstract
High-resolution species distribution maps are required for marine spatial planning, consenting, and licensing to assess interactions between anthropogenic activities and ecosystems. This approach can inform conservation measures for protected species and facilitate commercial developments needed for economic growth. A case study centred on Orkney, UK, is an area where concern for a declining harbour seal population has led to constraints being placed on tidal energy generation developments. Telemetry data from 54 animals tagged between 2003 and 2015 were combined with terrestrial counts from 2008 to 2015 to produce density estimation maps. Predictive habitat models using GAM-GEEs provided robust predictions in areas where telemetry data were absent, and were combined with density estimation maps. Harbour seal usage maps with confidence intervals were produced around Orkney and the North coast of Scotland. The selected habitat model showed that distance from haul out, proportion of sand in seabed sediment, and peak flow of tidal current were important predictors of space-use. Fine-scale usage maps can be used in consenting and licensing of anthropogenic developments to determine local abundance. When quantifying anthropogenic impacts through changes to species distributions, usage maps could be spatially explicitly linked to individual-based models to inform predicted movement and behaviour.
Citation
Jones , E L , Sparling , C E , McConnell , B J , Morris , C & Smout , S C 2017 , ' Fine-scale harbour seal usage for informed marine spatial planning ' , Scientific Reports , vol. 7 , 11581 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-11174-4
Publication
Scientific Reports
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2045-2322Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright The Author(s) 2017. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Description
The work was funded through Scottish Government MSQ0174 contract CR/2014/11; CREEM, University of St Andrews; the National Capability fund from the Natural Environment Research Council to the Sea Mammal Research Unit (grant no. SMRU1001); and MASTS pooling initiative, which is funded by the Scottish Funding Council (grant reference HR09011).Collections
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