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Federal Register / Vol. 86, No. 148 / Thursday, August 5, 2021 / Rules and Regulations
travel are not likely to disrupt biologically important behavioral patterns, and the Service does not view such minor changes in behavior as resulting in a take by Level B
harassment. It is also important to note that depending on the duration, frequency, or severity of the abovedescribed behaviors, such responses could constitute take by Level A
harassment e.g., repeatedly disrupting a polar bear versus a single interruption.
Evaluation of Take
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The general approach for quantifying take in this ITR was as follows: 1
Determine the number of animals in the project area; 2 assess the likelihood, nature, and degree of exposure of these animals to project-relative activities; 3
evaluate these animals probable responses; and 4 calculate how many of these responses constitute take. Our evaluation of take included quantifying the probability of either lethal take or Level A harassment potential injury and quantifying the number of responses that met the criteria for Level B harassment potential disruption of a biologically significant behavioral pattern, factoring in the degree to which effective mitigation measures that may be applied will reduce the amount or consequences of take. To better account for differences in how various aspects of the project could impact polar bears, we performed separate take estimates for Surface-Level Impacts, Aircraft Activities, Impacts to Denning Bears, and Maritime Activities. These analyses are described in more detail in the subsections below. Once each of these categories of take were quantified, the next steps were to: 5 Determine whether the total take will be of a small number relative to the size of the species or stock; and 6 determine whether the total take will have a negligible impact on the species or stock, both of which are determinations required under the MMPA.

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Pacific Walrus: All Interactions With the low occurrence of walruses in the Beaufort Sea and the adoption of the mitigation measures required by this ITR, the Service concludes that the only anticipated effects from Industry noise in the Beaufort Sea would be short-term behavioral alterations of small numbers of walruses. All walrus encounters within the ITR geographic area in the past 10 years have been of solitary walruses or groups of two. The closest sighting of a grouping larger than two was outside the ITR area in 2013. The vessel encountered a group of 15
walrus. Thus, while it is highly unlikely that a group of walrus will be encountered during the proposed activities, we estimate that no more than one group of 15 Pacific walruses will be taken as a result of Level B harassment each year during the ITR period.
Polar Bear: Surface Interactions Encounter Rate The most comprehensive dataset of humanpolar bear encounters along the coast of Alaska consists of records of Industry encounters during activities on the North Slope submitted to the Service under existing and previous ITRs. This database is referred to as the LOA database because it aggregates data reported by the oil and gas industry to the Service pursuant to the terms and conditions of LOAs issued under current and previous incidental take regulations 50 CFR part 18, subpart J.
We have used records in the LOA
database in the period 20142018, in conjunction with bear density projections for the entire coastline, to generate quantitative encounter rates in the project area. This 5-year period was used to provide metrics that reflected the most recent patterns of polar bear habitat use within the Beaufort Sea ITR
region. Each encounter record includes the date and time of the encounter, a general description of the encounter,
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number of bears encountered, latitude and longitude, weather variables, and a take determination made by the Service.
If latitude and longitude were not supplied in the initial report, we georeferenced the encounter using the location description and a map of North Slope infrastructure.
Spatially Partitioning the North Slope Into Coastal and Inland Zones The vast majority of SBS polar bear encounters along the Alaskan coast occur along the shore or immediately offshore Atwood et al. 2015, Wilson et al. 2017. Thus, encounter rates for inland operations should be significantly lower than those for offshore or coastal operations. To partition the North Slope into coastal and inland zones, we calculated the distance to shore for all encounter records in the period 20142018 in the Services LOA database using a shapefile of the coastline and the dist2Line function found in the R
geosphere package Hijmans 2019.
Linked sightings of the same bears were removed from the analysis, and individual records were created for each bear encountered. However, because we were able to identify and remove only repeated sightings that were designated as linked within the database, it is likely that some repeated encounters of the same bear remained in our analysis.
From 2014 through 2018, of the 1,713
bears encountered, 1,140 66.5 percent were offshore. While these bears were encountered offshore, the encounters were reported by onshore or island operations i.e., docks, drilling and production islands, or causeways. We examined the distribution of bears that were onshore and up to 10 km 6.2 mi inland to determine the distance at which encounters sharply decreased Figure 2.
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