Digital collection of aerial photographs from the Common Murre Restoration Project, 1997 (NCEI Accession 0037159)

The Common Murre Restoration Project is a comprehensive seabird restoration effort aimed at enhancing depleted seabird populations in central California, specifically those of the common murre (Uria aalge). The main focus of the project is to reestablish a colony of murres on a small seastack called Devil's Slide Rock, located along the San Mateo coast near Pacifica. This breeding colony held close to 3,000 murres as recently as the early 1980s, but was wiped out as a result of human-caused mortality. (from Common Murre Restoration Project web page, http://www.fws.gov/sfbayrefuges/Murre, which was last updated September 17, 2008)

To provide a baseline and to determine the efficacy of the restoration project, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Complex has taken photographic slides during aerial surveys of bird colonies since the mid 1980s. As part of the NOAA Climate Database Modernization Program funded project entitled "California Coastal Marine Ecosystem Surveys - Slide Imaging and Archiving (task order L-24)," a contractor scanned 35mm color slides taken during 1997 and created master (archival TIFF) and web-access (JPEG) images. NODC Accession 0037159 contains these images along with supporting documentation.