Flying seabird aerial surveys at the Rauer Group, Svenner Islands and Vestfold Hills, December 2017

Full description

The dataset contains boundaries of nest areas of surface nesting flying seabirds at numerous breeding sites across Prydz Bay, Antarctica. The sites are at islands in the Rauer Group, the Svenner Islands and two islands (Bluff Island and Gardner Island) off the Vestfold Hills. The boundary data were obtained from aerial photos of slopes where flying seabirds had been previously observed. The aerial photos were taken on 1 December 2017. Marcus Salton and Kim Kliska conducted the aerial photography and delineated the GIS boundaries representing the nesting areas.

The database of potential Adélie penguin breeding habitat as described by the metadata record 'Sites of potential habitat for breeding Adélie penguins in East Antarctica' (http://data.aad.gov.au/metadata/records/AAS_4088_Adelie_Potential_Habitats) was used to associate flying seabird nest areas to a particular island and to structure how the boundaries are stored. The Adélie penguin breeding site database has a unique identifying code for every island in East Antarctica, and the islands are aggregated into spatial sub-groups and then spatial groups. The file structure in which the boundaries are stored has a combination of ‘island’, ‘sub-group’ and ‘spatial group’ (or region) at the top level (e.g. VES_SG_10 contains all boundaries in spatial group VES (Vestfold Hills and islands) and sub-group 10). Within each sub-group folder are folders for each island where photos were taken (e.g. IS_72276 is Gardner Island in the VES_SG_10 group).

The data is comprised of:
(i) a polygon shapefile for each island on which flying bird nest areas were observed; and
(ii) a single polygon shapefile for each of Rauer Group, Svenner Islands and Vestfold Hills in which the polygons in (i) are combined.

The polygons in the shapefiles have a Type attribute with values ranging from A to E.
A = Nests present
B = Searched and no nests present
C = Nests or salt stains (the investigators were unable to decide whether what they were seeing was nests or salt stains)
D = Snow cover
E = Not searched

Lineage

Progress Code: completed

Statement: There are fundamental issues with this work/data. It was a trial/test to an approach that did not give an accurate record of the seabird colony boundaries. The researchers recommend that users do not use this data for the purpose of indicating the colony boundaries. The researchers do not believe that the data contained within this dataset would pass a QA/QC check.