This Darwin Plus-funded project, which began in the summer of 2022, represents a collaborative effort of the University of Liverpool, Turks and Caicos National Trust, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Turks and Caicos Reef Fund, SAERI Falklands Ltd, BirdLife International and the Turks and Caicos Islands' Department of Environment and Coastal Resources to address major gaps in knowledge about the populations of seabirds that call this UK Overseas Territory home.
The Turk and Caicos Islands (TCI) are a key breeding area for seabirds in the Caribbean, once supporting globally and regionally important numbers. Currently, almost nothing is known about the distribution, size, and health of populations. Coastal environments of TCI are under extreme pressure from rapid development, and improving our knowledge of seabirds is essential for their protection. This project is working to develop site-specific and species-specific population monitoring programmes for 15 resident species. This will provide up-to-date seabird assessments that will help managers to develop appropriate and effective conservation strategies for seabirds and their habitats, as well as equip local organisations with the tools to monitor, manage and protect seabirds in the long term. |
Dr Austin of our collaborative working group, began a EU Horizon 2020-funded research fellowship* based at Deakin and the Heriot-Watt Universities in October 2021, involving a large network of data collaborators across tropical and temperate regions.
The project aims to determine the interplay between the social and learned components of foraging behaviour, and their relationship to specialisation in behaviour (e.g. in movements and diet), across an ecologically important group of seabirds (the Sulids - boobies and gannets) living in a range of environments in tropical and temperate oceans. The project will use GPS and bird-borne video data from tracked birds to undertake a family-scale comparison of behavioural specialisation in seabirds, and determine how common group and solitary foraging is in different species that inhabit diverse environments. It is hoped that this work will enable predictions to be made about the adaptive capabilities of populations to ongoing environmental change. * This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 844027. |