Seabirds: Management Problems and Research Opportunities

摘要: The 280 species of seabirds occupy all the world’s oceans from polar leads to tropical blue-water, so their management and research needs vary greatly. On other hand, they share certain characteristics that tend make them vulnerable human activity. They are long-lived reproduce slowly; breed in large numbers on predator-free islands; feed relatively small areas high biological productivity. Universal problems include egging, hunting, oiling, contamination with persistent pollutants, competition commercial fisheries. Future likely range shifts because global warming, loss nesting sites sea level rise, increased disturbance, humans for marine resources. Rapid advances technology, such as doubly-labelled water, instrumentation measurement foraging growth, satellite tracking, non-lethal sampling diet allow increasingly detailed basic information biology seabirds. At sea, while methods counting birds have improved estimates density, greatest been made linking bird distribution oceanographie features primary productivity, fronts, prey. In contrast research, few techniques developed primarily seabirds; most focus maintaining or restoring island ecosystems used by seabirds, removing introduced predators regulating two promising seabird next decade involve large-scale cooperative projects identify protect critical breeding islands at use scientifically-sound models designed populations