Federal Register - June 1, 2021
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Source: Federal Register
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Federal Register / Vol. 86, No. 103 / Tuesday, June 1, 2021 / Proposed Rules
Histogram of Encounters by Day of Year
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Day of Year
Figure 3-Distribution of polar bear encounters in the Southern Beaufort Sea and adjacent North Slope of Alaska in the period 2014-2018 by Julian day of year. Dotted lines delineate the "open" vs. "ice" seasons. Open season begins on the 200th day of the year July 19th and ends on the 315 th day of the year November 11 th.
North Slope Encounter Rates bears/season/km2
Encounter rates in were calculated using a subset of the
Industry encounter records maintained in the Services LOA database. The
following formula was used to calculate encounter rate Equation 1:
Bears Encountered by Season Area Occupied km 2
projects that proceeded as planned and those that were never completed.
Finally, we relied upon the institutional knowledge of our staff, who have worked with operators and inspected facilities on the North Slope. To determine the area around industrial facilities in which a polar bear can be seen and reported, we queried the USFWS LOA database for records that included the distance to an encountered polar bear. It is important to note that
these values may represent the closest distance a bear came to the observer or the distance at initial contact. Therefore, in some cases, the bear may have been initially encountered farther than the distance recorded. The histogram of these values shows a drop in the distance at which a polar bear is encountered at roughly 1.6 km 1 mi Figure 4.
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The subset consisted of encounters in areas that were constantly occupied year-round to prevent artificially inflating the denominator of the equation and negatively biasing the encounter rate. To identify constantly occupied North Slope locations, we gathered data from a number of sources.
We used past LOA applications to find descriptions of projects that occurred anywhere within 20142018 and the final LOA reports to determine the
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Equation 1
