Seabirds

The primary role of this component is broadly defined within the context of long-term research that seeks to identify and understand the factors that regulate the demography of Adélie penguins with research focused on breeding chronology, breeding biology, foraging ecology and population dynamics. The core, long-term data associated with these studies are derived primarily from local populations distributed over approximately 150 km² near Palmer Station. At-sea surveys of abundance and distribution of these and other seabirds over an area of approximately 150,000 km² provide a larger-scale context for these studies. This nested approach to hypothesis testing and development capitalizes on databases that span more than three decades, allowing the PAL seabird component to address a broad suite of ecological issues. These include interactions between climate migration and community structure, the effects of landscape geomorphology on biological populations, the mechanics of source-sink population dynamics, and establishing basic conceptual and empirical links between marine and terrestrial ecology.