Seabirds as indicators of the marine environment

By M. Parsons, I. Mitchell, A. Butler, N. Ratcliffe, M. Frederiksen, S. Foster, J. Reid. 2008

221 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03305a63d2d41102435304817ac9c6debc20e9c3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. R. Phillips
2. W. Montevecchi
3. G. Davoren
4. A. J. Gaston
5. Jaime Ramos
6. S. Garthe
7. A. Hedd
8. M. Mallory

In Global and Planetary Change

1. W. Montevecchi
2. R. Phillips
3. G. Davoren
4. A. J. Gaston
5. J. M. Hipfner
6. M. Mallory
7. S. Garthe
8. S. Bograd

Citations in the corpus

• From hotspots to site protection: Identifying Marine Protected Areas for seabirds around the globe (2012, background): “, 2007; Hooker and Gerber, 2004), since, as oceanic top predators with global distributions, they have been recognised as excellent indicators of the health of the marine environment (Harding et al., 2005; Parsons et al., 2008; Sydeman et al., 2007); their distributions often overlap with other top ”
• Marine top predators as climate and ecosystem sentinels (2019, background): “Seabirds and pinniped colonies are particularly amenable to sampling on land, and as such they provide some of the best information on changes in ecosystem structure and function over multiple timescales (Parsons et al. 2008; Sydeman et al. 2015).”
• Potential consequences of discard reform for seabird communities (2013, unknown): “This relies on substantial financial investment, but has the potential to provide an indication of overall marine ecosystem health and thereby help support obligations under international biodiversity conventions (Parsons et al. 2008; Durant et al. 2009).”
• Towards ecosystem-based management: identifying operational food-web indicators for marine ecosystems (2017, background): “Many of these indicators are broad enough in context to be applied across many marine ecosystems (coastal, temperate, arctic, tropical, etc.; Fulton et al., 2005; Parsons et al., 2008; Coll and Libralato, 2012; Zador et al., 2014; Hayes et al., 2015).”
• Foraging plasticity in a pelagic seabird species along a marine productivity gradient (2010, background): “(3) Assuming that seabirds adapt their behaviour to cope with environmental heterogeneity, changes in their foraging parameters may be used as bioindicators of ecological changes in the feeding grounds they exploit (Parsons et al. 2008).”
• Threats to seabirds: A global assessment (2019, background): “They are also regarded as good indicators of the health of marine ecosystems (Piatt and Sydeman, 2007; Parsons et al., 2008), and have a key role in marine ecosystems, with an overall consumption of biomass of the same order of magnitude as global fisheries landings (Brooke, 2004; Cury et al.,…”
• Spatial scales of marine conservation management for breeding seabirds (2018, methodology): “Because many seabirds feed on fish and are near the apex of the marine food chain, they are useful indicator species for the health of the marine environment and for marine spatial planning [12-14].”
• Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs): the development and characteristics of a global inventory of key sites for biodiversity (2018, background): “…can be effective in capturing key sites or important populations of a wide range of other taxa, both on land (Pain et al. 2005, Tushabe et al. 2006, Butchart et al. 2012, 2015) and in the marine environment (Sydeman et al. 2007, Parsons et al. 2008, Lascelles et al. 2012, Butchart et al. 2015).”
• Seabird conservation status, threats and priority actions: a global assessment (2012, methodology): “Although relatively few in number, seabirds as a group occur in all seas and oceans worldwide, and their role as potential indicators of marine conditions is widely acknowledged (e.g. Boyd et al. 2006, Piatt et al. 2007, Parsons et al. 2008).”
• Changes in Canadian seabird populations and ecology since 1970 in relation to changes in oceanography and food webs (2009, background): “As predicted (Gill and Hatch 2002; Gill et al. 2002), nestling diets and growth rates reacted to environmental changes very rapidly (Parsons et al. 2008).”