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

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。本研究将检验关于海洋鸟类对白令海和阿留申群岛海洋过程时空变化响应的假设。利用30多年来收集的100多万条记录，该小组将分析(1)不同海洋域海鸟占用的季节模式；(2)海洋栖息地海鸟物种分布模式的稳定性；(3)不同海洋区域海鸟丰度的年-年时间尺度时间格局。这种方法将允许测试分布和丰度模式的时间稳定性，这些模式先前假设是重要的，但最初只有一到三年的数据可用。研究人员将利用同时获得的物理和生物数据，在可能的情况下，为观察到的海鸟分布和丰度模式寻求机制解释。这些数据包括自20世纪90年代初以来在海鸟调查中收集的浮游动物分布和丰度信息，以及由日本训练船Oshoro Maru进行的监测，以及由NOAA海底拖网和声学调查确定的饲料种类的分布和丰度。这些与海洋条件有关的海上海鸟评价将对海鸟作为海洋条件指标的远洋研究的效用进行广泛评价。这项研究是第一次对30多年来海鸟的海上分布和丰度进行调查。它有望展示海鸟如何应对气候驱动的水文条件变化，以及白令海东南部大陆架上浮游动物和饲料鱼的分布和丰富程度。这将是第一个高纬度的研究，以测试鱼食性和浮游食性（以及潜水与水面觅食）海鸟物种对生态系统变化的反应可能不同。

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.