Chapter 3 North Carolina Species
opportunities, conservation strategies, inventory and monitoring needs, research needs, education and outreach needs, and potential partners. Key information taken from those reports is summarized below. Where appropriate, the recommendations put forth in the SAMBI Plan should be incorporated into pelagic bird conservation efforts in North Carolina by all partner agencies and organizations. Key needs are detailed for Black-capped and Bermuda Petrels, most of which are in the Caribbean (Bermuda, Hispaniola, Lesser Antilles). It should be noted that some of the SAMBI Plan recommendations are not necessarily attainable in North Carolina but are included below to highlight the need for cooperation and coordination among states and countries to effect change. The impact that conservation efforts in North Carolina can have on pelagic seabirds is less direct, especially because most of the species do not breed in the state (except the occasional Sooty Tern). Key breeding areas for pelagic species include the Arctic region, the north Atlantic, the West Indies/Caribbean, and other portions of the south Atlantic. Still, all efforts to promote activities that aid in research, management, and conservation of pelagic seabird species should be pursued whenever possible in North Carolina. 3.11.3 Knowledge Gaps There is strong evidence that seabird bycatch rates vary by fishing fleet and by area (Yeh et al. 2013) . In a summary of studies done in the Atlantic Ocean from 1987 to 2006, reported bycatch rates varied from 0.07 birds per thousand hooks in Canadian fisheries in 2001 to 4.7 per thousand hooks for the fisheries of Uruguay in 1993/1994 (Tuck et al. 2011). A lack of observer data from most member countries constrained the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) Subcommittee on Ecosystems’ estimate of the annual seabird bycatch for the entire ICCAT area (e.g., Atlantic Ocean) (ICCAT 2010; Yeh et al. 2013) . The United States is a member of ICCAT and actively participates and supports the protocols and research recommendations developed by the organization. The ICCAT Standing Committee on Research and Statistics (SCRS) reviewed ecological risk assessments of the impact of ICCAT fisheries on sea turtles and seabird bycatch mitigation measures and recently developed a list of research needs. The recommendations for research topics include a need to review whether ICCAT mitigation measures reflect best practices; to develop indicators that can be used to evaluate the efficiency of mitigation measures; and to review the estimation methodologies and compile indirect bycatch mortality estimates for sea turtles (ICCAT 2014,) . Knowledge gaps and questions remain about the intrinsic aspects of plastic, severity of impact on human health and marine organisms, effective mitigation measures, and biomagnification across the food webs (Mejia et al. 2024) . Blood chemistry can be used as an indicator of overall health, and morphometric data are widely used in ecological studies to estimate body condition
2025 NC Wildlife Action Plan
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