Abstract
This document presents guidance for the estimation of sea-bird redistribution, as part of the ORJIP/Carbon Trust project entitled Improving Understanding of Distributional Change for Relevant Seabird Species (ImpUDis). This project consists of several work-packages, of which this guidance is part of the second. The project goals relevant to this guidance are:
- “Establish agreed methods and sources of evidence to … help improve consistency in future assessments and approaches to post-consent monitoring.”
- “Improve our understanding of seabird distributional change by developing, and applying, standard statistical methods.
This report builds upon initial work within the project, which included a comprehensive literature review of studies into the redistribution of seabirds in relation to offshore wind farm (OWF) development. Some elements and ideas are reproduced here – refer to Murrell et al. (2025) for full original context. In particular, we adopt their definition of distributional change, where the presence of an OWF has the potential to influence the distribution of seabirds at sea, either through displacement, or attraction – leading to distributional change being “the active selection, or avoidance, of an area following the construction of an OWF”.
For more information, read the Final Report, Literature and data review, Analysis of existing data, and project value statement.