Aerial Photographs for Common Murre Colony Restoration Project

Photographic slides document the Common Murre Restoration Project, an effort to reestablish a breeding colony of nearly 3,000 birds on Devil's Slide Rock in central California. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Complex collected these images during aerial surveys from the mid-1980s onward. A NOAA-funded project scanned 35mm slides from 2006, creating archival TIFF and web-access JPEG images.

Use Cases

• Assessing colony size and population changes at Devil's Slide Rock over time using visual counts from aerial imagery.
• Evaluating the efficacy of seabird restoration projects by comparing pre- and post-intervention photographic records.
• Providing a visual baseline for studies on human-caused mortality impacts on coastal bird colonies.
• Supporting geospatial analysis of seabird habitat use on a specific coastal seastack near Pacifica, California.

Strengths

• Provides a long-term visual record, with aerial surveys conducted since the mid-1980s.
• Includes high-quality archival master images (TIFF) created from scanned 35mm color slides.
• Focuses on a specific, historically significant colony that held close to 3,000 murres in the early 1980s.

Limitations

• The dataset description contains a conflicting year notation ('20066'), creating ambiguity about the primary scan date.
• Key metadata such as column names, row counts, file size, and specific license are unavailable from all sources.
• The most recent authoritative project webpage referenced was last updated in 2008.

Provenance

Source

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Complex; processed under NOAA's Climate Database Modernization Program.

Collection Method

Aerial photographic surveys of bird colonies, with subsequent scanning of 35mm slides to create digital images.

Time Range

mid-1980s to 2006

Freshness

2026-04-01 15:32:07.158915

Geography

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