Building database of unique data set of northern fur seals metal tag resighting on the Commander Islands, Kamchatka, Russia. NPRB Project# 1022,

Little is known about the population structure of pinnipeds in the Bering Sea region between the 1950’s and the late 1980’s. This period is of great interest to scientists because
populations of NFS, Steller sea lions, harbor seals and sea otters began to precipitously decline during this time. Our project addresses this critically important information gap for northern fur
seals. More than 313,000 northern fur seal pups were flipper-tagged on the four fur seal rookeries on the Commander Islands from 1961 to 2007. From the early 1960’s to the end of the 1980’s, we made
more than 28,000 resightings of fur seals with flipper tags on these rookeries. Our database also includes a complete dataset of pup counts (both alive and dead), fur seal commercial harvest information,
rookery plans, and copies of original reports (in Russian). These datasets were archived as part of the North Pacific Research Board legacy project recovery effort undertaken by Axiom Data Science and NPRB in 2025. The goal of the recovery effort was to assess the NPRB-funded data projects from 2002 to 2014 and archive final data packages that were ready for publication to increase long-term accessibility and discoverability. Data packages were archived as is given limited funding and resources.