Funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation

We are developing and testing an affordable tool for monitoring seabirds in remote locations. Long-term, this will facilitate standardized monitoring of threatened seabirds around the world. In our first stage, we are targeting 5 sea bird colonies in Northern California.

Background

Seabirds play key functional roles in the ocean and on islands, and link these two ecosystems. However, seabirds are the most threatened group of marine species. Fortunately the threats to seabird are well understood and many species respond positively to relatively low-cost management action. To maximize the conservation return on investment, funders and managers must be able to accurately and comparably measure the benefits of conservation actions.

Three factors significantly impede accurate measurement of seabird population. First, most seabird monitoring efforts are expensive. This is because deployment and maintenance of biologists on remote islands is labor intensive, requires specialized equipment and transport, and involves complex logistical planning. Second, it is often difficult to detect species and individuals at breeding sites because many threatened seabirds nest in underground holes or crevices and only emerge under the cover of darkness. Finally, seabirds tend to breed in crowded, multi-species colonies, where frequent disturbance by survey teams can lead to negative impacts. Together, these factors present significant challenges that often prevent accurate measurements of the effectiveness of conservation actions. We propose to develop a low-impact, replicable, and cost-effective method for measuring seabird population changes on islands -- cell-phone based acoustic monitoring networks.

Funding is provided by Coastal Conservation Action Lab at UC Santa Cruz.

We are working with UC Santa Cruz to deploy these phones on several remote islands to evaluate their marine conservation efforts.