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Habitat-mediated population limitation in a colonial central-place forager : the sky is not the limit for the black-browed albatross
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dc.contributor.author | Wakefield, Ewan David | |
dc.contributor.author | Phillips, Richard A. | |
dc.contributor.author | Mattiopoulos, Jason | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2014-02-26T10:31:04Z | |
dc.date.available | 2014-02-26T10:31:04Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2014-03 | |
dc.identifier.citation | Wakefield , E D , Phillips , R A & Mattiopoulos , J 2014 , ' Habitat-mediated population limitation in a colonial central-place forager : the sky is not the limit for the black-browed albatross ' , Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , vol. 281 , no. 1778 , 20132883 . https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.2883 | en |
dc.identifier.issn | 0962-8452 | |
dc.identifier.other | PURE: 99620525 | |
dc.identifier.other | PURE UUID: a70a8c3d-64b4-4ff4-8688-806935328a2e | |
dc.identifier.other | Scopus: 84892577399 | |
dc.identifier.other | WOS: 000332382300013 | |
dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10023/4467 | |
dc.description | This work was supported by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NER/S/A/2005/13648). | en |
dc.description.abstract | Animal populations are frequently limited by the availability of food or of habitat. In central-place foragers, the cost of accessing these resources is distance-dependent rather than uniform in space. However, in seabirds, a widely studied exemplar of this paradigm, empirical population models have hitherto ignored this cost. In part, this is because non-independence among colonies makes it difficult to define population units. Here, we model the effects of both resource availability and accessibility on populations of a wide-ranging, pelagic seabird, the black-browed albatross Thalassarche melanophris. Adopting a multi-scale approach, we define regional populations objectively as spatial clusters of colonies. We consider two readily quantifiable proxies of resource availability: the extent of neritic waters (the preferred foraging habitat) and net primary production (NPP). We show that the size of regional albatross populations has a strong dependence, after weighting for accessibility, on habitat availability and to a lesser extent, NPP. Our results provide indirect support for the hypothesis that seabird populations are regulated from the bottom-up by food availability during the breeding season, and also suggest that the spatio-temporal predictability of food may be limiting. Moreover, we demonstrate a straightforward, widely applicable method for estimating resource limitation in populations of central-place foragers. | |
dc.language.iso | eng | |
dc.relation.ispartof | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences | en |
dc.rights | © 2014 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. | en |
dc.subject | Population regulation | en |
dc.subject | Seabirds | en |
dc.subject | Density dependence | en |
dc.subject | Habitat preference | en |
dc.subject | Net primary production | en |
dc.subject | Spatial segregation | en |
dc.title | Habitat-mediated population limitation in a colonial central-place forager : the sky is not the limit for the black-browed albatross | en |
dc.type | Journal article | en |
dc.description.version | Publisher PDF | en |
dc.contributor.institution | University of St Andrews. School of Biology | en |
dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.2883 | |
dc.description.status | Peer reviewed | en |
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