Aerial Photographs of California Common Murre Colony Restoration, 1997

Central California's Devil's Slide Rock seabird colony is documented in this digital collection of aerial photographs from 1997. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created the images to establish a baseline for the Common Murre Restoration Project, which aims to reestablish a colony of nearly 3,000 birds lost in the early 1980s. The dataset consists of scanned 35mm color slides from aerial surveys, archived by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Use Cases

• Analyzing seabird colony size and distribution on Devil's Slide Rock using georeferenced aerial imagery.
• Establishing a visual baseline for pre-restoration conditions of the Common Murre (Uria aalge) population.
• Monitoring changes in seabird habitat and nesting sites along the San Mateo coast over time.
• Supporting research on the impact of human-caused mortality and environmental degradation on keystone species.

Strengths

• Provides a specific visual baseline from 1997 for a colony that held close to 3,000 murres in the early 1980s.
• Images were created as part of a formal NOAA Climate Database Modernization Program project (task order L-24).
• Includes both master archival TIFF and web-access JPEG formats for different use needs.

Limitations

• The exact number of images (row count) and total dataset size are not provided by any source.
• Sources conflict on the last updated date: one platform lists 2026-03-05, while another lists the original 1997-07-10 date.
• Column names and specific metadata structure for the images are unknown.

Provenance

Source

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Complex, archived by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Collection Method

35mm color slides from aerial surveys of bird colonies were scanned by a contractor under a NOAA project.

Time Range

1997

Freshness

2026-03-05 22:23:17.394885

Geography

Devil's Slide Rock, San Mateo coast near Pacifica, central California.