Area of Study: Seabirds

Seabirds play a special role in the ecosystem, as they link the marine and terrestrial world by foraging at sea, but nesting on cliffs on land, bringing nutrients to land. Moreover, since seabirds are on top of the food chain, monitoring seabirds can tell us more about the state of the ecosystem below the water surface. The Cape Verde archipelago is known to be a global seabird hotspot. Despite this, seabird populations have declined sharply, often by direct capture, leading to the disappearance of populations on some islands and islets. Take Raso, an islet with six breeding seabird species, where the current population numbers are just a shadow of those reported in Darwin’s time. Biosfera intends to address the profound lack of basic knowledge on seabird ecology in Cape Verde and to identify and mitigate threats both on land and at sea. For this, the population size and breeding success of the seabirds on Raso is being monitored regularly. With newly developed technologies such as flying drones, these monitoring efforts could be carried out more efficiently and accurately. In this Darwin200 project, we tried out this new methodology for counting two colonies of Brown Booby on Raso islet and compared this technique to manual counts.