Bering Sea Retrospective: seabirds as indicators of spatial variability and temporal change

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).This study will test hypotheses about the responses of marine birds to spatial and temporal variability in ocean processes in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands. Using a data set of over a million records compiled over thirty years, this group will analyze (1) seasonal patterns of seabird occupancy of various ocean domains, (2) the stability of distributional patterns of seabird species among oceanographic habitats at annual to decadal time scales and (3) temporal patterns in seabird abundance within different ocean regions over annual to decadal time-scales. The approach will permit testing the temporal stability of patterns in distribution and abundance previously hypothesized to be important, but for which initially only one to three years of data were available. The researchers will seek mechanistic explanations for the patterns observed in seabird distribution and abundance using concurrently-obtained physical and biological data, where available. These data include information on zooplankton distribution and abundance collected during seabird surveys since the early 1990s, monitoring conducted by the Japanese training ship Oshoro Maru, and the distribution and abundance of forage species as determined by the NOAA bottom trawl and acoustic surveys. These evaluations of seabirds-at-sea in relation to ocean conditions will provide a broad evaluation of the utility of pelagic studies of seabirds as indicators of ocean conditions.This study is the first to examine the at-sea distribution and abundance of seabirds over a 30+ year period. It is expected to show how seabirds have responded to climate-driven changes in hydrographic conditions and in the distribution and abundance of zooplankton and forage fish over the southeastern Bering Sea shelf. It will be the first high-latitude study to test how the responses of piscivorous and planktivorous (and diving vs. surface-foraging) seabird species to ecosystem change may differ.