Aerial Survey of Areas in the Southwest Celtic Sea for Seabird and Marine Mammal Species for the POSEIDON Project

Natural England is seeking a DAS framework contractor to design and carry out four digital aerial surveys of the prescribed study area (9 ICES cells in the Southwest Celtic Sea), in each of the four seasons defined below. Ideally, each of the 9 ICES rectangles that comprise the study area will be surveyed at least once in each season. Seasons are defined as:

1) October - December 2022 2) January - March 2023 3) April - June 2023, and 4) July - September 2023.

The selected DAS framework contractor will use the most up to date digital aerial imagery (video or still) methods and process the resulting imagery to provide a comprehensive digital dataset from which robust estimates of the abundance and distribution of birds and marine mammals in survey areas can be derived.

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