Monthly Vulnerable Seabird Concentrations to Oil Spills in UK Waters, 1995

Seabird concentration data highlights the most vulnerable aggregations for each month of the year in offshore waters based on abundance and vulnerability to oil pollution. The data was compiled in 1995 from the European Seabirds at Sea Database, with points representing the center of 1/4 ICES Rectangles. It is provided by the Joint Nature Conservation Committee and visualized on Natural England's MAGIC site.

Use Cases

• Modeling oil spill impact zones based on monthly seabird vulnerability layers.
• Assessing seasonal changes in ecological risk based on monthly aggregation data.
• Informing marine protected area planning based on vulnerable seabird concentrations.
• Calibrating environmental risk models based on abundance and vulnerability scores.

Strengths

• Data is geospatially referenced to 1/4 ICES Rectangles (15' lat x 30' long).
• Provides monthly temporal resolution for vulnerability analysis.
• Compiled from the authoritative European Seabirds at Sea Database.

Limitations

• Data is from 1995; population distributions and threats may have changed.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and file size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Joint Nature Conservation Committee

Collection Method

Observations captured manually or electronically from navigational equipment; calculated values derived from sea surveys for the European Seabirds at Sea Database.

Time Range

1995

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-14 09:48:06.870219; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Offshore waters, likely UK and surrounding regions, based on ICES rectangles.