Quantitative Ecology/Ethology/Evolution Discussion

Date: 

Thursday, March 18, 2021, 4:00pm

Location: 

Zoom

"Remote Sensing of Secluded Ecosystems’ Health - Challenges and Perspectives Using the Example of Penguin Colonies" with Daniel Zitterbartan Assistant Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

 

"Remote Sensing of Secluded Ecosystems’ Health - Challenges and Perspectives Using the Example of Penguin Colonies" with Daniel Zitterbartan Assistant Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

 

Understanding, mitigating and reversing human-induced loss of biodiversity is one of the most important and urgent scientific, economic, and ethical challenges we face today. This is especially true for marine ecosystems, as the oceans play a key role in regulating world climate and are home to much of the world’s biomass and biodiversity. An effective approach to investigate the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems is to monitor top-predator populations, such as seabirds. Animal movements inherently encode ecosystem health, and are today mainly measured by biologging efforts which are difficult to conduct in very remote regions. We have developed methods to expand the scope of ecosystem remote sensing, from its current focus on large-scale long-term dynamics (e.g. animal population distribution and counts) to include remote sensing animal behavior. Penguins are a prime species for such studies, as they sample a large oceanic area, while returning to the same colony, where their behavior can be analyzed. I will present recent work on our efforts to use remotely sensed collective behavior of Emperor and Adélie penguins to better understand penguin colony and ecosystem health.

 

Register in advance (password: penguin). 

 

Contact: itolkova@g.harvard.edu