Quantifying the role of oceanic storminess in determining the survival and recruitment of long-distance, oversea, migratory birds

鸟类的迁徙主要是从基于陆地鸟类的研究中了解的，但在关于长寿海鸟和在公海上迁徙的鸟类的迁徙模式的文献中存在明显的空白。海鸟是海洋健康的极好生物指标，因为它们在海上觅食，每年从繁殖地迁徙到越冬地，然后再返回。这种旅程往往需要一些时间（几天到几个月），许多旅程覆盖数千英里，在此期间，海外气象条件和海况可能会对迁徙模式发挥重要的随机作用，阻碍或促进迁徙者的生存和种群补充，这可能会根据鸟类的经验，即年龄而有所不同。然而，人们对环境变化的后果知之甚少，在移徙过程中个人的行为、他们选择前往何处以及海洋风暴和天气变化对生存和人口补充的影响方面仍然存在问题。 该项目将研究三种候鸟的数量和生存情况：（Puffinus puffinus）生活在北方爱尔兰科普兰鸟类观测站的灯塔岛上，它们环绕大西洋飞行10,000公里，在阿根廷海岸过冬，在英国和爱尔兰繁殖;北方管鼻蝠（Fulmarus glacialis）在Eynhallow，奥克尼，苏格兰，越冬沿着大西洋中脊3,000公里，从他们的繁殖地在苏格兰;和爱尔兰西海岸的黑雁（Branta leucopsis），它们在格陵兰北极繁殖，在2,000公里外的爱尔兰过冬。为此，我将使用捕获标记再捕获建模技术的长期年度时间序列数据集，其中包含这三个迁徙物种的100，000个鸟鸣记录，以估计每年的生存概率，人口估计和增长率，并与来自遥感卫星数据和海洋浮标的气象条件进行分析，这些气象条件是它们在迁徙的各个阶段都会经历的。该项目提供了一个机会，询问有关鸟类在开放海洋上的迁移模式如何与环境变化相互作用的基本问题，以及使用特殊的长期数据集对个人和种群的影响。此外，该项目还将制定一项监测和监督协议，以估计丰度和丰度随时间的变化。

Avian migration is largely understood from studies based on terrestrial birds but there is a noticeable gap in literature on migration patterns in long-lived seabirds and birds that migrate over open oceans. Seabirds are excellent biological indicators of ocean health because they forage at sea and make massive distances every year to migrate from their breeding grounds to their overwintering grounds and back again. Such journeys often take some time (days to months) and many journeys cover thousands of miles, during which oversea meteorological conditions and sea state may have an important, stochastic, role to play on migration patterns by either impeding or facilitating a migrant's survival and population recruitment, which may vary according to bird experience i.e. age. However, the consequences of environmental variability is poorly understood and questions still remain on the behaviour of the individual during migration, where they choose to navigate to and the influence of oceanic storms and weather changes on the survival and population recruitment. This project will study the population and survival of three migratory birds: Manx shearwaters (Puffinus puffinus) on Lighthouse Island at the Copeland Bird Observatory, Northern Ireland, which circumnavigate the Atlantic Ocean flying 10,000 km to overwinter in the Argentinean coast and breed in Britain and Ireland; Northern fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) on Eynhallow, Orkney, Scotland, overwinter along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge 3,000 km from their breeding grounds in Scotland; and barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) in the west coasts of Ireland, which breed in Arctic Greenland and overwinter in Ireland over a distance of 2,000 km. For this I will use long-term annual time-series datasets of capture-mark-recapture modelling techniques which contain 100,000s of bird ringing records of these three migrant species to estimate the annual survival probabilities, population estimates and growth rates, and analyse this with meteorological conditions derived from remotely-sensed satellite data and ocean buoys, which they would have experienced at various stages of their migration. This project offers the opportunity to ask fundamental questions about how migration patterns in birds over open oceans interact with environmental variability and the consequences for individuals and populations using exceptional long-term datasets. Furthermore, this project will put in place a monitoring and surveillance protocol to estimate abundance and change in abundance over time.