4.6  Surveillance of additional attributes

It is not yet considered possible or appropriate to use some of the potential attributes described in section 4.3. The identification and selection of attributes for the Cardigan Bay bottlenose dolphins above as a means of measuring the condition of the site’s bottlenose dolphins. Some of these are, instead, considered priorities for surveillance and are listed below. Surveillance, whilst hopefully helping to reveal changes in the status of the cSAC s dolphins, will also improve our knowledge of the population, possibly to the extent of eventually enabling full use of the attribute to properly monitor bottlenose dolphin condition.

In addition to the surveillance of these additional attributes, many of the factors affecting the bottlenose dolphin population and its habitat will also need to be subject to surveillance. This is described in section 5. of this management plan, dealing with the factors affecting the feature and the management response.

Priority Attributes for surveillance:

·   Reproductive success and mortality

·   Population structure

·   Health