Historical Adelie penguin breeding population estimates in the Australian Antarctic Territory

Full description

Ecologists are increasingly turning to historical abundance data to understand past changes in animal abundance and more broadly the ecosystems in which animals occur. However, developing reliable ecological or management interpretations from temporal abundance data can be difficult because most population counts are subject to measurement or estimation error.

There is now widespread recognition that counts of animal populations are often subject to detection bias. This recognition has led to the development of a general framework for abundance estimation that explicitly accounts for detection bias and its uncertainty, new methods for estimating detection bias, and calls for ecologists to estimate and account for bias and uncertainty when estimating animal abundance. While these methodological developments are now being increasingly accepted and used, there is a wealth of historical population count data in the literature that were collected before these developments. These historical abundance data may, in their original published form, have inherent unrecognised and therefore unaccounted biases and uncertainties that could confound reliable interpretation. Developing approaches to improve interpretation of historical data may therefore allow a more reliable assessment of extremely valuable long-term abundance data.

This dataset contains details of over 200 historical estimates of Adelie penguin breeding populations across the Australian Antarctic Territory (AAT) that have been published in the scientific literature. The details include attributes of the population count (date and year of count, count value, count object, count precision) and the published estimate of the breeding population derived from those attributes, expressed as the number of breeding pairs. In addition, the dataset contains revised population estimates that have been re-constructed using new estimation methods to account for detection bias as described in the associated publication. All population data used in this study were sourced from existing publications.

Lineage

Progress Code: completed

Statement: See the referenced publication for more information.