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Forty-six species totaling approximately 80 million individual seabirds breed in Alaska and the Russian Far East. During the summer, seabirds gather in groups to breed and nest. A group of nesting birds is referred to as a colony. This dataset contains colonies of 1000 or more of these species. These colonies are distributed on all parts of the Alaskan and Russian Far East coasts. Seabird colonies have been censused for many years and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has compiled much of the census data in the North Pacific Seabird Colony Database. The database stores data on the location, breeding population size, and species composition of seabird colonies in the North Pacific. Documented colonies total 1,801 in Alaska and 484 in Far East Russia, each with a few pair to 5.75 million birds. |