Urban gull surveys: methods and design

Our overall objective is to develop a firm plan for surveying urban nesting gulls in the UK and Ireland. We anticipate:

• A review of existing methodologies, including an evaluation of their advantages and disadvantages, with a primary focus on established land- and air-based techniques, and a secondary focus on novel and potential methodologies;
• A review of current knowledge on distribution of urban nesting gulls;
• Proposals for the most cost-effective ways to perform a census of urban nesting gulls, informed by the methodological review, with consideration of the trade-off between cost and effort and the point of diminishing returns;
• Firm recommendations for the design and implementation of the surveys for the SNCBs, with full costs estimated and broken down by individual country / dependency (all within British Isles with the addition of Republic of Ireland); and;
• Costs broken down by individual country / dependency (all within British Isles with the addition of Republic of Ireland); and
• Ranges of costs presented according to differing preferred methodologies (e.g. cost if all covered by method A; cost if all covered by method B; cost if partially A and partially B; etc.).

At this stage we are not seeking testing or ground-truthing of available methods, although reference to existing studies (including any readily available unpublished data) is welcomed.

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