European Ocean Biodiversity Information System

Data collected within the EMBLAS-Plus "EU-UNDP Project 'Improving Environmental Monitoring in the Black Sea' (EMBLAS-II)" (http://emblasproject.org/). EMBLAS-Plus is co-financed by the European Commission (EC) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The project implementation started on 1 April 2014 and ended on 31 May 2018, having the total duration of 50 months. The EMBLAS project is addressing the overall need for support in protection and restoring the environmental quality and sustainability of the Black Sea. The specific objectives are as follows: Improve availability and quality of Black Sea environmental data in line with the MSFD and Black Sea Strategic Action Plan (2009) needs; Improve partner countries' ability to perform marine environmental monitoring along MSFD principles, taking into account the Black Sea Diagnostic Report II recommendations on capacity building. Cetacean occurrence data was collected to implement the Programme of the cetacean monitoring of the Ukrainian territorial waters in the north-western part of the Black Sea on the following work packages (WP): WP2. Assessment of distribution, abundance and density of marine mammals in the territorial waters of Ukraine. WP3. Assessment of distribution, abundance and density of marine mammals in coastal waters. In the framework of the Project EMBLAS-Plus, Improving Environmental Monitoring in the Black Sea - Selected Measures, 2 studies were performed in the summer and autumn of 2019: linear transect ship-based survey in the territorial waters of the north-western Black Sea and a series of dolphin photo-identification activities in order to obtain data for WP2 and WP3 respectively. Linear transect surveys was designed according to standard principles of distance sampling (Buckland, 2004; Buckland et al., 2001). Total 564 km of effort of 14 transects was covered the area of 13,000 km2. Data obtained in the WP2 are stored using the Data Collection Template (DCT). During the photo-identification study of local coastal dolphin groupings each dolphin was photographed from both sides, captured dorsal fins were classified and catalogued (Würsig & Jefferson, 1990, Wilson et al., 1999; Urian et al., 2015). In total, there were 15 days of photo-identification effort, including waters north-east, east to the Danube delta, near the Zmiinij Island, waters of the Dzharylgach Island, Odesa Gulf, waters near the Kinburn and Tendra Spits.