Feasibility of extending SeabORD to the entire breeding season: study
SeabORD is a method that can assess displacement and barrier effects from offshore renewables on seabirds, but is currently limited to four species during the chick-rearing season. This review examined ways to improve the SeabORD model including extending to the entire breeding season.
Appendix E: Approach for resolving the discrepancy in the specification of baseline mean survival
The value of s0j in Equation 6 is currently set equal to the published/established baseline mean survival rate, but this leads to the discrepancy outlined in Appendix B.
This could be overcome by, instead, using an intercept in Equation 6 which is based on an alternative value of such s0j that the mean survival rate simulated by a baseline run of SeabORD matches the value of s0j (i.e. the published/established baseline mean survival rate). In practice, this value could be identified, to any specified level of precision, by minimizing (e.g. via numerical optimization) the absolute difference between the published/established rate s0j and the mean survival rate simulated by SeabORD. This would be straightforward to do, as the optimisation would only involve re-running the calculation in Equation 4 many times (which would be very fast), not re-running SeabORD itself many times (which would be very slow).
Contact
Email: ScotMER@gov.scot