Marine radar counts of Marbled Murrelets

Data Rescue Intern: Sarah Ravoth

In winter 2024, I was an intern with Environment and Climate Change Canada through the LDP program, working with a long-term seabird dataset. Specifically, I worked with data collected on marbled murrelets, a small seabird found in the North Pacific. Marbled murrelets spend most of their time foraging at sea and breed in old-growth forests along the coast; they are listed as Threatened under the Canadian Species at Risk Act primarily due to loss of old growth nesting habitat.

Survey boat with radar station anchored at Power River catchment entrance.

A monitoring program was established in 1996 to estimate population trends of marbled murrelets across the BC coast. The coast is divided into six conservation regions, with multiple radar sites within each, most only accessible by boat. The marbled murrelet team visit each site three times per year and use marine radar to detect and count birds making their dawn transits between the ocean and forest. These data have been used to analyze temporal population trends within each conservation region and across the province, and in response to climatic events (“The Blob” marine heatwave from 2014-2016).

This internship's primary aim was to make this detailed longitudinal dataset accessible to the public. We accomplished four goals:

1. To tidy and reformat data prior to publication using reproducible R scripts
2. To raft detailed metadata so data contents are interpretable 
3. To publish data publicly to improve accessibility and persistence into the future 
4. To draft data management protocols for publishing and updating data to ensure consistency 

​Data can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25308250.v1 and supplementary documentation at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ZSG63. Many thanks to the marbled murrelet team for their support and guidance during this internship.