SWFSC Marine Mammal Survey, Vaquita 2008, Cruise 1637

Marine Mammal and Turtle Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NMFS, NOAA

The 2008 Vaquita Expedition was a joint US-Mexican effort to provide the best scientific data possible to aid the government of Mexico in conservation decisions for the vaquita. The study area was the northern end of the Gulf of California south to about 30.8 degrees north latitude. A line-transect survey of the deeper water of the study area was conducted by the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center aboard the NOAA ship David Starr Jordan in October and November 2008. This dataset provides the time-date and geographical coordinates, by species/stock, of all cetaceans detected during the survey, as well as the daily and intra-daily start and end points of the line-transect survey.

The primary objective was to collect data to estimate the abundance vaquita, or Gulf of California harbor porpoise.

This dataset is supplemental to the following datasets:
SWFSC Marine Mammal Survey, Vaquita 1997, Cruise 1608

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.
All attributes are included in the downloadable file (CSV or ESRI File Geodatabase) for "Complete Set of Dataset".

Attributes in dataset

Attribute (table column)	Description
oid	Unique ID number (generated by OBIS-SEAMAP)
cruise	Cruise No
obs_date	Date of the sighting
obs_time	Time of the sighting (local time zone)
sighting_no	Sighting No.
species_org	Species code in original format
sp_obs	Species code recorded
sp_tsn	Taxonomic Serial Number added by OBIS-SEAMAP
latitude	Latitude in decimal degrees
longitude	Longitude in decimal degrees
obs_count	Group size
geom	Geometry field added by OBIS-SEAMAP