Head of Tourism Research at the Icelandic Seal Center, Dr. Georgette Leah Burns, visited Telemark Univeristy in Bø, Norway, last week as part of an Erasmus exchange. Whilst there, she taught classes on nature based tourism and managing visitors in protected areas. She also presented a public lecture entitled “From Dingoes to Seals: Exploring the Ethics of Managing Wildlife Tourism”.
Handbook of Tourism and Sustainability
The Routledge Handbook of Tourism and Sustainability was recently published. The book is essential reading for students, researches and academics interested in the possibilities of sustainable forms of tourism and tourism’s contribution to sustainable development.
Dr. Leah Burns Head of the Seal Centers Tourism Researh department wrote a chapter in the book titled Ethics in Tourism.
More information on the book: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415662482/
Dr. Leah Burns
Results of harbour seal count 2014
The results of the 2014 Harbour Seal count have now been released.
About the Harbour Seal Count
Harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) were counted in some of the largest haul-out sites in Iceland between July and September 2014; in the West Iceland, the West fiords and the North West of Iceland. To compare different methods, the seals were counted from a Cessna aircraft and by using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Harbour seals on the shores of Vatnsnes were in addition counted once from a helicopter in co-operation with the icelandic coast guard. When comparing the counting methods, it is clear that both different methods works equally well to collect data, although flying a UAV can be considered as safer for the counting personal compared with counting from a Cessna aircraft. Further, using a UAV is more time consuming and consequentally the Cessna aircraft can cover a bigger area in a shorter time. Hence, over all, using the Cessna aircraft to count harbour seals in Icelandic condition can not be considered more expensive than by using a UAV.
Main Results
The results show that compared with counts from the same areas in 2011, the number of seals had decreased. In 2011, the icelandic harbour seal population was estimated to 11-12.000 seals in total. Despite decreasing harbour seal hunting in Iceland, the results from the present study indicate an annual decrease of around 30% during the period 2011 to 2014. It is important to underline that to find out the status of the harbour seal population as a whole, all haul-out sites should be counted and to get a significant result, each site should preferably be counted three times. This was however not possible in 2014, due to financial restrictions. Since there is an indication of a sever decrease in the harbour seal population in Iceland, it is of great importance to conduct a population count in 2015, when four years has passed since the last population estimate was carried out.
The project was funded by the Ministry of Industries and Innovation and is a cooperation between The Institute of Freshwater Fisheries, The Icelandic Seal Center, Vör Marine Research Center and Svarm ehf.
Grant from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science
Sandra Granquist, employee of the Institute of Freshwater Fisheries and head of seal research at the The Icelandic Seal Center recently received a grant from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science for her studies on the foraging system of harbour seals in Iceland. The aim of the project is to assess the importance of salmonids (salmon, trout and charr) in the food of harbour seals by using stable isotope analysis. The method is well known from archaeology research and further often used by biologist to give indications of the position of animal species in the food chain as well as the proportion of food that cosists of freshwater species vs. marine species. Therefore, the study will indicate how much salmonid species that harbour seals are likely to consume.
Sandra Granquist
The impact of Sealwatching on harbour seals
The impact of Sealwatching on the behaviour and haul-out pattern of harbour seals
Two scientific articles were recently published in international scientific magazines. First author of both is Sandra Granquist head of biology research department of the Icelandic Seal Center. The articles cover Sandra’s research on the interaction between harbourseals and tourists on the Vatnsnes peninsula in the North west of Iceland.
The first articleThe effect of land based seal watching tourism on the haul-out behaviour of harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) in Iceland was published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Sandra’s coauthor is Hrefna Sigurjónsdóttir, professor at the University of Iceland. In their research the effect of sealwatching was investigated. The behaviour of the tourists during sealwatching was also investigated. The results show that the behaviour and spatial haul-out pattern of seals was affected by the tourists. The seals were more likely to be vigilant during periods when tourists had access to the area, compared to a period when tourists were not allowed in the area. Also the likeliness of the seals being vigilant increased as the number of tourists in the area increased. In addition, seals were more likely to be vigilant when tourists behaved in an active way. The article suggests that the impact of tourism can be minimized by developing and using codes of conduct at the sealwatching sites. The article can be accessed here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159114001075
The second article Who´s watching who? -An interdisciplinary approach to studying seal watching tourism in Icelander was published in the Journal for Cleaner Production. Sandras’s coauthor is Per-Åke Nilsson at the Mitt University in Östersund, Sverige. Mutual exchange and acceptance of research results between different academic disciplines, such as wildlife ecology and tourism research, has until recently been scarce. Absence of discipline-independent guidance on the management of wildlife tourism, in combination with a lack of knowledge-transfer from academia to society regarding how human impact can be reduced, may contribute to unintended disturbance of wildlife. The authors introduce a methodology, where use and protection constitute equal importance within wild animal watching, by showing how a synergetic gain of combining knowledge from different academic disciplines may occur and be implemented in order to decrease potential human disturbance on harbour seals (Phoca vitulina). Further, they suggest that improved transferal of interdisciplinary research from academia to industry increases understanding of the wildlife tourism industry and has the potential to change tourist behaviour and hence minimize disturbance of wild animals. The article can be accessed here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652614012645