Harbour and grey seals: distribution maps

6. Acknowledgements

The analyses were funded by the Scottish Government Marine Directorate with additional support from NERC (INSITE Phase II NE/T010614/1 EcoSTAR), the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ, facilitated by Hartley Anderson Ltd.) and NERC National Capability - National Public Good funding (NE/R015007/1) which supported DJFR. Telemetry tags and their deployment in the UK were funded by the Scottish Government Marine Directorate through the ScotMER programme, DESNZ (and previous incarnations), NERC, NatureScot, the Met Office, Menter Môn, Marine Current Turbines, Ørsted, The Crown Estate, Highlands & Islands Enterprise, Moray Firth Renewables Limited (MORL), Beatrice Offshore Windfarm Limited (BOWL), Vodafone UK, University of Aberdeen, SMRU, and SMRU Instrumentation Group. Data from seals tagged in Ireland were obtained from University College Cork, funded by Beaufort Marine Award (administered by the Irish Marine Institute), the Irish Research Council and the National Parks and Wildlife Service Ireland. Data from seals tagged in France were provided by Université de La Rochelle, funded by l’Office Français de la Biodiversité (OFB). Fieldwork was supported by OFB, Océanopolis and Zoo de la Flèche. Aerial surveys conducted by SMRU were funded by NERC (NC NPG: NE/R015007/1), NatureScot, the Scottish Government Marine Directorate and Scottish Power. We are grateful to Mark Jessopp (University College Cork) for contributing data and expertise, and the many people involved in tagging and survey work, as well as the support and assistance of landowners and managers at field sites. We thank Dr Sam Jones (Scottish Association for Marine Science) for provision of Potential Energy Anomaly data. We also thank Dr Gavin Simpson (Aarhus University), whose expert knowledge of GAMMs shared on statistics forums and blog posts proved extremely helpful.