COMPLEMENTING AND VALIDATING THE BIOLOGGING DATA USED TO INDICATE TROPHIC AND DIVERSITY HOTSPOTS IN THE SOUTHERN OCEAN

Indicator species are often used to reveal trends and trophic “hotspots” for fishery and marine food web monitoring and can be particularly useful in the remote Southern Ocean due to the cost and accessibility of ship-based marine research. Biologging, the use of micro-electronic animal borne devices, is increasingly being applied to detect areas of species abundance and diversity and can be important for management efforts. An essential component to effective utilization of biologging is ground-truthing of the patterns, to establish the robustness of the data and the conclusions being drawn from it. This project aims to use at sea survey data and biologging data collected on marine mammals and sea birds in the Ross Sea to validate and refine how biologging information can predict indicator species distributions and identify areas of importance for biodiversity. Antarctic marine conservation strategies have focused on the identification and protection of bird/animal breeding colonies through national and international initiatives. However, foraging areas are also important, and ecosystem-based management involves establishing protected ocean areas where fishing is either excluded or tightly controlled. Seabird and marine mammal prevalence and distribution are often used as ecological indicators reflecting stability, change and spatial patterns in marine food webs. These patterns can signal “hotspots” of prey availability at scales from localized prey aggregations to broader oceanographic features such as fronts and upwelling plumes. At-sea surveys of seabird and marine mammal distributions have traditionally served to inform these decisions, but more recently telemetry tracking of individuals is being applied to the process. While biologging is a promising strategy, it is potentially a biased view due to the small sample size, being primarily focused on breeding adults, and limited to animals that are accessible to researchers (spatial bias). This project aims to ground-truth biologging data with at-sea data to better understand how well biologging describes the entire population, which will help to improve the effectiveness of Southern Ocean conservation and management. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.