Impacts of long-line fishing on seabirds: toward identifying geographical “hotspots” of seabird mortality

The purpose of RTD 08 was to canvass the collating, into a centralized database, of all tracking data on seabirds (principally albatrosses and petrels) affected by long-line fisheries. The objective: to identify the areas of ocean utilized most intensively by each species. The resulting map of records would be used to pinpoint areas where interaction with long-line fisheries is highest, thus warranting priority conservation attention. Beyond that, the initiative was seen as the first fundamental step towards the identifying Important Bird Areas (IBAs) on the high seas. BirdLife International’s Seabird Conservation Programme offered its services as an independent NGO (with no academic interest in the data) to take the program forward, and proposed to seek funding for a technical workshop in South Africa in the latter part of 2003. Prior to the present RTD, a circular outlining the initiative was distributed to all interested and affected parties; and responses from dataholders were overwhelmingly positive

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