United States

Welcome Seabirders!  

Welcome to Virtual World Seabird Conference 3 - vWSC3! Whether you are in your office or lab, at home, in a coffee shop or bar poaching some wifi, or at a remote field site or research vessel – we are very excited to welcome you to the third ever World Seabird Conference. 

We would like to thank ALL of you for being so patient as WSC3 was scheduled, postponed, rescheduled, revised to virtual, and scheduled again. Throughout all those iterations there was one message that remained perfectly clear – seabirders were eager to meet and share their science. If we could not meet in person then virtual it would have to be, but a 3rd WSC was something everyone wanted. That support and commitment helped the WSU Board of Directors and Member Societies sort through all of the challenges they faced to plan and hold this conference. 

The list of those that need to be thanked is long and, while we plan on recognizing many during the live closing plenary, it is important to do so here in writing as well. 

The Australasian Seabird Group was our Local Host for our plan to meet in Hobart, Tasmania. They invested substantial time and effort to find venues and plan events that we unfortunately were not able to visit. Nonetheless we appreciate their work on behalf of WSC3 and encourage all of you to thank them when you see their members in Gathertown or elsewhere during our virtual meeting. Their willingness to host created the initial excitement for WSC3 and without that our vWSC would not have been possible.

We also wish to thank the Science Program Committee, the Virtual Committee, and the Early Career Scientist Committee for their hard work planning the logistics, events, and schedule for vWSC3. These committees also had to deal with changing parameters and short timelines that made what is always a challenging task even more challenging. The Travel Awards Committee also invested time and effort in developing procedures for awarding travel funds that ultimately would not be implemented. 

Our ability to shift from an in-person to a virtual meeting, and to do so in a way that would be financially feasible, was due to the effective efforts of The International Fundraising Committee and to our financial sponsors. The IFC raised funds to support WSC3 and then, through the good relationships they built with sponsors, ensured we could re-envision how those funds could be used to support a virtual conference that would be affordable and high-quality.

We all owe the WSU Board of Directors and the Representatives of the Member Societies a great deal of thanks. They are the ones who manage the WSU and, for the past 18 months, have had to have a series of challenging meetings and conversations, have had to make a series of difficult choices, have had to do all of that while considering the short- and long-term health of WSU and the World Seabird Conferences, and did this while also managing their own challenges at their day jobs. We are grateful for their diligence, patience, foresight, and throughout all of the meetings, their collegiality. Also – a 6-year term is quite a commitment!

There would not be a WSC3 without a successful WSC1 and WSC2. Thanks go to the Pacific Seabird Group for their support of WSC1 in Victoria, Canada, and to the African Seabird Group for their support of WSC2 in Cape Town, South Africa. In each of these endeavors and for our current conference we were fortunate to work with a dependable and trustworthy partner in Podium Conferences. Michelle Smith and Marischal de Armond have become valued members of our team and have not only helped us plan conferences but have assisted and advised the WSU Chairs and Board on issues above and beyond conference planning. 

As we embark on our vWSC3 week we extend to all of you our thanks for showing up, for being patient, and most importantly for the work you do with seabirds. We are all part of a unique, global community that shares an interest, a fascination, and a passion for birds that make a living in our world’s oceans. We have advanced the science, conservation, and management of seabirds as well the ecosystems they inhabit. We are consistently impressed and motivated by the work you do. 

The WSU formed in 2010 because we saw the need for a global organization to address challenges at a global level. Over the past 11 years WSU has grown, adapted, and evolved to become the community that this week is making vWSC3 a reality. Enjoy the week, appreciate and support the friends and colleagues you have made in the community, and if you see us in a virtual hallway please stop and say hello! 

Thank you for the opportunity to serve all of you and the WSU over the past few years,

Nicholas Carlile, Interim Chair, WSU<br>
Patrick Jodice, 2nd Chair of the WSU<br><br>

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3rd World Seabird Conference

Join us for four days of science, networking and virtual engagement with delegates from around the world!

**Abstract:**

Procellariform seabirds (petrels, shearwaters) are the world's most threatened bird group, particularly in New Zealand, where 90% of our seabirds are at risk. As could be expected, reversing this trend is of significant conservation interest for New Zealand. Key to achieving this is understanding the effects of environmental conditions on breeding seabirds, with more agile monitoring methods desperately needed. To this end, mechanistic and integrative monitoring approaches are providing high resolution information with much quicker turnaround times c.f. annual demographic studies. By incorporating endocrinology, haematology, Hidden Markov modelling (HMM), and stable isotope analyses, resource managers are able to identify colonies that are potentially vulnerable in the absence of overt and established monitoring signals i.e. chick rearing failure. For example, establishing new colonies via translocation of seabird chicks is currently used for many species, but colony location is critical i.e. establishing colonies far from feeding grounds is counterproductive. Using GPS tracked common diving petrels (Pelecanoides urinatrix) breeding in the Hauraki Gulf we hypothesised that 1) there were physiological limits as to how far from feeding grounds colonies could be established; and 2) due to distance from feeding grounds, inner Gulf colonies would show higher stress (CORT), and spend more time commuting rather than foraging. However, CORT profiles were more affected by breeding stage (highest in chick rearing) than colony location. Moreover, HMM analyses and stable isotopes showed inner Gulf birds foraged locally but spent more effort chasing higher trophic prey (fish/cephalopods). Such ecophysiological insights demonstrate that, providing sufficient fish cephalopod prey exist, planned translocations of diving petrels further into the Gulf can occur, thus offering a new tool to arrest the decline of this species within the region.

**Authors:**

Brendon Dunphy¹, Shae Vickers², Edin Whitehead¹, Jingjing Zhang¹, Todd Landers³, Sarah Bury⁴, Matt Rayner⁵

¹The University of Auckland, ²The Ministry of Primary Industries, ³Auckland Council, ⁴National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, ⁵Auckland War Memorial museum

Conservation physiology of seabirds: integrative assessments to guide colony translocations.

symposium

Magnetoreception in seabirds

Does personality mediate the reproductive consequences of broad-scale climate phenomena?

Unravelling the foraging behaviour of the world's longest migrant

Colony attendance of common guillemots during the non-breeding season

Widespread but infrequent deep diving in a mollymawk albatross

Between- and within- individual variation in the migration of a tropical seabird, the Round Island petrel

Assessing trophic links, individual movement, and habitat use of non-breeding Northern Gannets

Monitoring colonial seabirds with commercial marine radars

The effect of marine anthropic activities on the behavior of Humboldt penguin (Spheniscus humboldti) in two guano islands of Peru

Year round movements of the Arctic Skua - understanding drivers of change in a declining species

technical paper

https://d3smihljt9218e.cloudfront.net/transcript/22684/subtitle/323107bef2967924015e70be45966aa0.vtt

English

Conservation physiology of seabirds: integrative assessments to guide colony translocations.

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