Seabird assemblages observed during the BROKE-West survey of the Antarctic coastline (30°E-80°E), January - March 2006

• Published in: Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography
• Main Authors: Woehler, EJ, Raymond, B, Boyle, A, Stafford, A
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd 2010
• Subjects: Biological Sciences; Ecology; Behavioural Ecology; Antarctic; Arctic; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Arctic tern; Sea ice; Snow Petrel
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr2.2008.12.041; http://ecite.utas.edu.au/63740

Seabird surveys in January March 2006 of a poorly known area of the Southern Ocean adjacent to the East Antarctic coast identied six seabird communities, several of which were comparable to seabird communities identied both in adjacent sectors of the Antarctic, and elsewhere in the Southern Ocean. These results support previous proposals that the Southern Ocean seabird community is characterised by an ice-associated assemblage and an open-water assemblage, with the species composition of the assemblages reecting local (Antarctic-resident) breeding species, and the migratory routes and feeding areas of distant-breeding taxa, respectively. Physical environmental covariates such as sea-ice cover, distance to continental shelf and time of year inuenced the distribution and abundance of seabirds observed, but the roles of these factors in the observed spatial and temporal patterns in seabird assemblages was confounded by the duration of the survey. Occurrence of a number of seabird taxa exhibited signicant correlations with krill densities at one or two spatial scales, but only three taxa (Arctic tern, snow petrel and dark shearwaters, i.e. sooty and short-tailed shearwaters) showed signicant correlations at a range of spatial scales. Dark shearwater abundances showed correlations with krill densities across the range of spatial scales examined.