Because they are so many birds and so few observers around Antarctica, every observation matters. The recently launched marine biodiversity internet portal SCAR-MarBIN allows birdwatchers to directly upload their data, making them available to scientists as well as the general public.

As top predators, birds are an important component of the Southern Ocean‘s ecosystem. They are part of the comprehensive effort of the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML) to study the distribution and abundance of the Antarctic biodiversity. CAML is now using the SCAR MarBIN portal, developed at the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences by Claude De Broyer and Bruno Danis, to concentrate biogeographical data on biodiversity ranging from microorganisms to whales.

Although there is no official bird research program onboard Polarstern ANTXXIII/8, it is compensated by the presence of amateur birdwatchers among the biologists. For this leg, Henri Robert and Gauthier Chapelle are combining their observations to give a daily qualitative overview of the encountered avifauna. In order to contribute to the CAML program, all their observations are compiled in a day-to-day list accessible to anyone and can be viewed with Google Earth [See note below]. Also the whale countings during this expedition of Meike Scheidat and Linn Lehnert are entered into this international database.

The crossing of the Antarctic Convergence has provided the maximum abundance of tubenose birds, with Cape Petrels and Antarctic Fulmars as the most numerous. In terms of diversity, our best day was off Livingstone, South Shetlands, with a combination of tubenose birds, including 5 species of albatross, and coastal species like the Chinstrap Penguin, the Brown Skua and the Kelp Gull. The photograph depicts a Black-browed Albatross. This particular zone was probably rich in food resources, as demonstrated by the highest concentration of whales seen so far. Sailing south through the Antarctic Sound caused a rapid shift to High Antarctic species closely associated with sea ice such as the Emperor Penguins and Snow and Antarctic Petrels.

Text: Henri Robert & Gauthier Chapelle
Photograph: Gauthier Chapelle

[Editor's note: to view animal sightings recorded with SCAR MarBIN in Google Earth, you first need to find the animal you are interested in, and then request a download of the data in Google Earth's native format, KML.

For example, to view reported sightings of the Cape petrel, Daption capense, search for it by name. The resulting page offers plenty of details about Cape petrels, and at the very bottom of the page you will find a link to its "Distribution Map". Click on that link. Wait a while for a map to generate.

To now create a version of the map for viewing in Google Earth, click on the "Download data" button in the map control panel. You will be prompted to download the data in various formats. Choose KML. Be patient, as the downloaded file can be up to 10MB large.



To make the resulting view in Google Earth more user friendly, right click on the folder containing the data in Google Earth and select "Get Info" from the contextual menu. Click on the "Style, Color" tab, and then on the "Share Styles" button. Now you can reduce both the label size and icon size to about half the current value, and also choose a more generic icon. Have fun experimenting — Stefan Geens]