Seabird monitoring: witnesses in the wild

Laure Cugnière, Fiona M. Jones & Ignacio (Nacho) Juarez

The polar regions are immensely special, but are rapidly changing due to direct human disturbances, like fishing activity and habitat degradation. Penguins and other seabirds are key environmental health indicators as well as the most threatened group of birds globally. Near the top of the food chain, and often covering large geographical areas over their lifetime, changes in their populations are likely to reflect changes to the wider environment. But to understand the threats faced by seabirds, we need data on a huge scale. Yet, making sense of the huge data flow generated would be impractical for researchers on their own. So how do you monitor seabirds at a large enough scale to make a difference?

Our vision
We are the Polar Ecology and Conservation research group at the University of Oxford, who work on developing projects to address the challenges related to the monitoring of seabirds, and in turn, the polar regions. Penguin Watch was launched in 2009 to test a new technique that combined remote time-lapse camera technology with citizen science as a way of monitoring penguin populations. Following our success, we broadened our research to the northern polar region and other seabird species, in 2014, with Seabird Watch. While the threats to seabirds are severe and increasing, our ability to provide near-real time data to policymakers and potentially reverse these threats has never been greater (hence the need for fieldwork).

Step 1: Penguinologists in the field
Conducting fieldwork in remote locations like Antarctica is extremely challenging. We are only able to visit once a year and the risk of something going wrong is higher than most places. The use of a remote camera network means that the data continues to be collected when we are away.

To further improve our capacity to reliably travel in the region, we collaborate with several Antarctic tour operators (primarily Quark Expeditions and Cheeseman’s Ecology Safaris). With their help, we can travel faster and more consistently to sites from year to year. As part of these collaborations, we also work to engage their passengers about our research and the polar regions. Once back from the field, the support of the public is critical for our research (hence the need for citizen science).

Step 2: Citizen science
Since the launch of our project, we have gained over 50,000 volunteers and have classified, thanks to them, well over a million images (it is actually over 8 million images, but each image is seen multiple times until a consensus is reached). During April alone this year, we saw more images counted than in the previous two years combined! Our projects are particularly popular in the classroom but also with young adults from nearly 60 different countries. 

When volunteers log-on to our project, on the Zooniverse platform, they are shown a random time-lapse image and asked to ‘tag’ any individuals they see as either an ‘Adult’, ‘Chick’, ‘Egg’ or ‘Other’. ‘Other’ could refer to another species of seabird, a human, or even a ship – this helps us understand the penguins’ relationship with their environment.

Each image is automatically shown to four volunteers. If any one of those identify anything in the image, it is shown to a further six volunteers. This means that if there is an individual on the image that only one person has marked, it is likely to be an error and it can be removed. This data analysis process has proven rapid and accurate and does not require a ‘trial run’ for people to be able to help. This also means that anyone can help – even a 5-year-old is able to take part!

Citizen science is a brilliant two-way thing – we get the benefit of data, and people find taking part in our project an enriching and educational experience and love the feeling of ‘helping science’. And who does not love seeing wild penguin images?

How we want it to be

We want to involve and inspire the public about seabirds, the little visited polar regions and our planet through engagement and education.

We want to harness new technologies to make conservation science solutions easily accessible and efficient.

We aim to share our monitoring and data analysis techniques – which facilitate monitoring on a large scale at high resolution – with other researchers to boost seabird conservation globally.· We want our research to have a real-world impact by helping conserve seabirds in the polar regions using the most robust and tested data available.

Ultimately, we want our polar regions to be healthy and resilient.

…………………………………….

Laure Cugnière, Fiona M. Jones and Ignacio (Nacho) Juarez are part of the Penguin Watch team at the University of Oxford.

More information: penguinwatch.org

…………………………………….

This article was first published in Summer 2021 in Vol 127 of the NAEE journal which is available free to members.