Contract Award Provision of a survey team and co-ordination for a breeding survey of important cliff nesting seabird colonies in Ireland in 2015

Tender description

The Contract has now been awarded to Birdwatch Ireland. Under Directive 2009/147/EC Ireland along with other Member States are to take the requisite measures to maintain the populations of bird species naturally occurring in the wild. Fundamental to species conservation management is the availability of population data both at the site level and at a national scale. The last nationwide survey of seabirds, which was undertaken as part of the Seabird 2000 project, provided population estimates for over twenty seabird species that regularly breed in Ireland. This data is now becoming outdated and so a programme of seabird survey work and analysis spanning over several years is being developed. Many of our seabird species congregate each year to breed at multispecies colonies or ‘Seabird Cities’ which are often sited on inaccessible mainland cliff faces or on offshore islands. Many of these sites are designated as Special Protection Areas (SPAs) on account of their high seabird conservation value. In 2015 the field staff of the National Parks and Wildlife Service intends to survey the majority of these sites. However as the recommended survey period is quite narrow a proportion of the important sites will require additional survey effort. The totality of this 2015 cliff nesting seabird survey work will need to be co-ordinated in order to ensure that the data collected over the various sites across Ireland will conform both to: (1) the recommended survey methodology and (2) to be attributed to a standardised set of sites and subsites. The compilation of historical data with the new dataset will allow the production of site and species based trends.