Results of the 2002 Kenai Peninsula and lower Cook Inlet aerial sea otter survey
Bodkin JL, Monson DH, Esslinger GE. 2003. Results of the 2002 Kenai Peninsula and lower Cook Inlet aerial sea otter survey. U.S. Geological Survey,Alaska Science Center. Anchorage, AK
Coastal waters of much of Alaska provide habitat for at least three stocks of sea otters (Gorbics and Bodkin 2001) that occur from Southeast Alaska to Attu Island in the western Aleutian Archipelago (Kenyon 1969). Due to large geographic scale, remoteness, and perceptions of increasing populations, surveys of sea otter population size have rarely been routinely conducted in Alaska. Late in the 20th century large declines in sea otter density were documented in the Aleutian Archipelago, the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak Island (Estes et al. 1998, Doroff et al. 2003). The eastward extent of this decline in abundance remains unclear. Although limited historic population data are available from Cook Inlet and the Kenai Peninsula in the northern Gulf of Alaska, we conducted an aerial survey to estimate current population size and evaluate the potential eastward limit of the sea otter decline in Alaska.