Seabird Foraging Radii

The aim of the NPWS Seabird Foraging Radii Project was to create a number of polygon shapefiles describing the geographic foraging range of 20 seabird species identified by the National Parks and Wildlife Service Birds unit. The polygons were centred around Natura 2000 SPA (Special Protection Areas) centroids created by the Birds Unit. The foraging radii polygons were created to represent mean, mean-max and maximum foraging range journeys undertaken by the bird species of interest. The foraging range polygon shapefiles created during the process to geographically describe seabird foraging activity were merged into a single polygon shapefile.. This Project generated following datasets: An Excel spreadhseet 1 point shapefile representing the centroid location of Special Protected Area's (SPA) for all seabird species listed in the SBFR21_Foraging_range.xls One polygon shapefile representing the geographic extent of seabird foraging radii at mean, mean-max and maximum extent. The foraging radii were applied to centroids within the SPA network where a given seabird species was listed. Several species of seabird have foraging ranges outside Irish territorial limits.