Conserving the forgotten latitudes: approaches to wildlife management on Southern Ocean islands

• Main Author: Beer, Kate
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: Antarctic; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Elephant Seal
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10092/14167

The Southern Ocean or sub-Antarctic islands are broadly defined as the island archipelagos falling between 30o and 60o south. These islands are greatly influenced by their proximity to the Antarctic continent, but form a unique bioregion. The islands are characterised by low species diversity, but with high levels of endemism. They are also key breeding locations for Southern Hemisphere seabirds. Historically the sub-Antarctic islands have been isolated from human populations so were late to be discovered and rarely visited since then. However the islands were not immune to outside influence as first sealing industries exhausted the fur and elephant seal populations, and second the early settlers introduced non-native species that preyed upon island fauna and/or destroyed vegetation and habitats. In the present day, a number of these non-native species continue to wreck havoc on the islands, and they are widely recognised as the single largest threat to the biological integrity of the Southern Ocean islands. Other notable threats are human visitation, wildlife disease, and climate change. Of course, all these factors are inextricably linked, and impossible to consider in isolation. The potential for pest and disease incursion increases in a warming world, and increased tourism pressures in the Antarctic region mean there is also an increased interest in visiting the sub-Antarctic islands. Intensity of management efforts in the past thirty years has varied across the island groups, with different governing bodies taking different approaches to making and initiating management decisions. The global significance of many of the islands has been recognised through designation as World Heritage sites. Statutory management plans have increasingly been seen as crucial to guiding island management outcomes, and now nearly every island group has a guiding document of some sort. The most tangible management efforts have focussed on ecosystem restoration through the eradication of non-native species, mostly mammals. New ...