The BirdLife team are collating seabird tracking data for the Humboldt Current region and adjacent High Seas to assess fisheries bycatch risk as part of an ambitious collaborative project with Global Fishing
On Tuesday 3rd Dec, we celebrated 20 years of the Seabird Tracking Database! We had many activities with people attending online and in person. Here is a recap of everything that went on.
A new open access study published today highlights the remarkable achievements of the BirdLife Seabird Tracking Database (STDB) in marine conservation. Since its launch in 2004, the STDB has become one of the
Last month, four of us from the BirdLife International Marine Programme attended the 16th International Seabird Group Conference in Coimbra, Portugal: Ana Carneiro (Marine Science Manager), Antonio Vulcano (Marine Officer), Yann Rouxel (Bycatch
The highly productive waters around Antarctica (also known as the Southern Ocean) are particularly rich in seabird diversity, but this region and the seabirds that inhabit it are also highly threatened by a
Mannar Island is a vital migratory bottleneck and a key entry point that channels several million birds of the Central Asian Flyway (CAF) to Sri Lanka, one of the flyway’s southernmost destinations. The
Fishing for balance Fishing is a vital industry: providing over 3.3 billion people with at least 20% of their animal protein, and employing around 38 million people, globally. Different gear types, such as
Seabirds might not be the first thing you think of when you hear about Uzbekistan – a land locked country in central Asia, famed for its linkages to the Silk Road. But when
The Marine Megafauna Conservation Toolkit is an open-access online toolkit which facilitates scientists, conservationists, and policymakers to identify and advocate for the conservation of important sites for marine megafauna.
Marine flyways are the major routes migratory seabirds regularly use to travel between their breeding and non-breeding areas.
Knowing the spatial scales at which effective management can be implemented is fundamental for conservation planning. This is especially important for mobile species, which can be exposed to threats across large areas, but the space use requirements of different species can vary to an extent that might render some management approaches inefficient. Here the space use patterns of seabirds were examined to provide guidance on whether conservation management approaches should be tailored for taxonomic groups with different movement characteristics. Seabird tracking data were synthesised from 5419 adult breeding individuals of 52 species in ten families that were collected in the Atlantic Ocean basin between 1998 and 2017. Two key aspects of spatial distribution were quantified, namely how far seabirds ranged from their colony, and to what extent individuals from the same colony used the same areas at sea. There was evidence for substantial differences in patterns of space-use among the ten studied seabird families, indicating that several alternative conservation management approaches are needed. Several species exhibited large foraging ranges and little aggregation at sea, indicating that area-based conservation solutions would have to be extremely large to adequately protect such species. The results highlight that short-ranging and aggregating species such as cormorants, auks, some penguins, and gulls would benefit from conservation approaches at relatively small spatial scales during their breeding season. However, improved regulation of fisheries, bycatch, pollution and other threats over large spatial scales will be needed for wide-ranging and dispersed species such as albatrosses, petrels, storm petrels and frigatebirds.
Identifying important sites for biodiversity is vital for conservation and management. However, there is a lack of accessible, easily applied tools that enable practitioners to delineate important sites for highly mobile species using established criteria.
We introduce the R package ‘track2KBA’, a tool to identify important sites at the population level using tracking data from individual animals based on three key steps: (a) identifying individual core areas, (b) assessing population-level representativeness of the sample and (c) quantifying spatial overlap among individuals and scaling up to the population.
We describe package functionality and exemplify its application using tracking data from three taxa in contrasting environments: a seal, a marine turtle and a migratory land bird.
This tool facilitates the delineation of sites of ecological relevance for diverse taxa and provides output useful for assessing their importance to a population or species, as in the Key Biodiversity Area (KBA) Standard. As such, ‘track2KBA’ can contribute directly to conservation planning at global and regional levels.
