The North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative and its partners recently completed a large, collaborative mapping effort to show the distribution and abundance of marine birds in the Northwest Atlantic. Spatial and temporal information on the occupancy patterns of birds in offshore habitats is otherwise lacking throughout much of the North and Mid-Atlantic. The goal of the mapping effort was to develop and demonstrate techniques to document and predict areas of frequent use and aggregations of birds as well as the relative risk to marine birds within these areas.

This project integrated data from a number of ongoing marine bird survey efforts. Data for the maps spanned the Atlantic coastline from Maine to Florida and included over 2 million individual marine birds representing nearly 200 species. Spatial models were developed for 24 species of marine birds. These exposure maps use measures of density, rather than measures of impact on individual birds or species as a direct result of offshore energy developments. The resulting maps will help inform decisions about siting of offshore development as well as future marine spatial planning, and other uses requiring maps of seabird distributions.

Much of the map development was funded through the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative by leveraging ongoing projects funded by BOEM, DOE, USGS, and NOAA and involving research groups at the Biodiversity Research Institute, North Carolina State University, CUNY-Staten Island, the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, and the NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science-Biogeography Branch.

The complete final report, links to related projects and more information on the project can be found at the North Atlantic LCC website.