Long-term research programmes on New Zealand seabirds monitoring population trends, breeding success, survival and recruitment at colonies through the intensive monitoring of study burrows and night capture of seabirds on the surface. Banding all adults and surviving chicks handled during the work, and undertaking a range of tracking studies to understand foraging and migration patterns at sea as well as determine at-sea risks including climate change, fishing and pollution events.

I first fell in love with seabirds whilst working on a remote Scottish island surrounded by internationally important colonies. Since then, I've worked in seabird monitoring, training citizen scientists to survey seabirds at sea, and assessing the impacts of offshore industries on seabird populations. My current research is looking at individual foraging behaviour specialisation in Falkland Island shags, using a mixture of biologging, stable isotope analysis and dietary metabarcoding.

I started working with seabirds for my Honours thesis in 2021, studying the foraging and movement ecology of incubating red-breasted mergansers in New Brunswick using GPS-accelerometers. I quickly fell in love with seabirds and my study population, so I returned to study these same red-breasted mergansers for Master's in 2022, where I have since fast-tracked to become a PhD student. For my PhD, I am investigating the ecological, social, and evolutionary factors that promote conspecific brood parasitism in both hosts and parasites using molecular methods (microsatellite genotyping) and behavioural observations using camera traps at the nest.

Seabirds spend their lives under the water, in the sky, and on land, where they are exposed to a range of threats like invasive predators, fisheries bycatch, and impacts from climate change. As a result, they are one of the most endangered groups of birds in the world. Since a lot of seabirds spend most of their lives at sea and only come to remote islands to breed, they can be notoriously difficult to study. I use a suite of field methods including acoustic monitors, bird banding, satellite tracking, camera traps, nest monitoring, and more to peak into their lives. Then, I use quantitative methods in population ecology to understand the status and drivers of seabird populations as well as decision-analytic methods to inform management actions to conserve populations.

My research focuses on seabird spatial ecology, on topics dealing with behavioural ecology, life-history and population dynamics. I address a range of questions from understanding the drivers of migration and the consequences of migratory strategies on individual fitness and population dynamics, to investigating foraging niche differentiation in sympatric species, or the mechanisms of carry-over effects in migratory species. To address these questions, I use a combination of tracking loggers, video cameras, field experiments, and machine-learning analytical techniques. I work with mutliple seabird species across the North Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. At NINA, I co-lead SEAPOP fieldwork on the Røst archipelago (Northern Norway).

I am interested in the feeding and movement ecology of seabirds, and how this information can be used to inform conservation. My seabird work started on sub-Antarctic Marion Island, where I spent 13 months collecting baseline data on the feeding ecology and life histories of avian scavengers, as well as conducting long-term monitoring of ground-nesting albatrosses and petrels. Currently I am working on African Penguins, Cape Cormorants and Cape Gannets in South Africa. I use a suite of technologies such as animal-borne accelerometers, TDRs and cameras, as well as weighbridges to improve our understanding of the threats faced by these endangered species.

My research investigates the health consequences of exposure to physical pollutants (e.g., plastic) in seabirds.

Gabriela is a PhD student specializing in seabird reproductive biology and population dinamics in relation to ocean productivity and climate change. She has worked with diversity in the Gulf of Mexico region and currently works with the nesting tern and Heermann's Gull population of Isla Rasa in the Gulf of California.

Katrina Siddiqi-Davies is a postdoctoral researcher within the Oxford Biology Department, specializing in the captivating domain of movement behaviour and ecology, particularly focusing on a procellariform seabird, the Manx shearwater. She is responsible for leading fieldwork across multiple shearwater colonies to track shearwaters at all life stages and better understand their spatial distribution. Hopefully this will also help inform policy makers and offshore wind farm developers within the Celtic and Irish Sea. She is also interested in scientist and artistic collaborations/alternative ways to communicate ideas and writes poetry surrounding wildlife. She is also the Social Media Manager for the Seabird Group.

Sarah is the national coordinator of seabird monitoring and assessment in Canada. Her role is to assist in developing consistent and efficient monitoring strategies for Canada's seabirds that allow for effective assessments of population size and trends.

For my honours research, I am investigating a mass mortality event that affected Thick-billed Murres in the North Atlantic in 2022. Right now, I am particularly interested in climate and anthropogenic factors impacting seabird populations.

I began working with seabirds in Australia during my honours degree studying nano and microplastic ingestion in two shearwater species. Currently, I am a PhD student in New Zealand researching the foraging ecology and spatial distributions of Erect-crested penguins. This involves travelling on a small sailing vessel to remote sub-Antarctic islands during the breeding season. While there, I help deploy GPS loggers, satellite trackers and animal-borne cameras, and assist to collect blood samples to conduct stable isotope analyses.