Hi Anant, the information about seabird populations in the southern ocean is local and fragmented. There are good data sets in some places where research teams are working since many years (then you should put in contact with these researchers looking for first their publications) but in most other places there was not people working or they work ocassionaly. There are some reports about penguins and other seabirds but quite old, but you can look for publications by the Antarctic Site Inventory http://www.oceanites.org/science/ for more recent data.

WOEHLER, E.J. 1993. The distribution and abundance of Antarctic and Subantarctic penguins. Cambridge: Scientific Committee

on Antarctic Research.

E.J. WOEHLER & J.P. CROXALL. 1997. THE STATUS AND TRENDS OF ANTARCTIC AND SUB-ANTARCTIC SEABIRDS. Marine Ornithology 25:43-66.

Good luck

Andres

Thanks Andres for the links and papers. I will get back to you on these.

Hi Anant, a very useful resource is certainly OBIS-SEAMAP, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System Spatial Ecological Analysis of Megavertebrate Populations. It is a spatially referenced online database, aggregating marine mammal, seabird and sea turtle observation data from across the globe. It is managed by the Duke University. It puts together data from ship/aerial surveys and satellite telemetry as well as acoustic monitoring and PhotoID around the globe. You can find exhaustive and comprehensive information at http://mgel.env.duke.edu/projects/obis-seamap/ and browse/download data from the project website at http://seamap.env.duke.edu/ . As you will see there are many ways to browse the data. The southern Ocean is also covered. The interesting thing is that together with the data, there are the references to the publications dealing with those same data as well as contact references for the people/organizations who collected them. It is certainly worth a try. Moreover, the scientific literature is rich in papers as well; examples are, just to cite the first three that i can remember:

Costa, D. P. & Crocker, D. E. in Antarctic Research Series (Hofmann, E. E., Ross, R. M. & Quetin, L. B.) 70, 287–301 (American Geophysical Union, 1996).

Geraci, J. R. & Lounsbury, V. J. in Health of Antarctic Wildlife (Kerry, K. R. & Riddle, M.) 13–34 (Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009). at

Harington, C. R. The evolution of Arctic marine mammals. Ecol Appl 18, S23–40 (2008).

Thanks Nino. I looked at the SEAMAP database and found it to be extremely useful. the data however exists in patches and at a coarser resolution. As I plan to collect data on environmental parameters as well, how does one measure visibility on sea? Light may affect seabird abundance while at sea and I am thinking of using this as a co-variate.

Hi Anant, what do you mean with "measure visibility on sea"? Light penetration in the water, albedo, solar radiation, earth radiation budget, somebody's visibility when in the water... As far as i know there are some open source tools to be implemented in GRASS GIS. The following links might be of help:

http://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Energy_calculations

http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/xxxviii/3-w22/pdf/155_XXXVIII-3-W22.pdf

http://www.isprs-ann-photogramm-remote-sens-spatial-inf-sci.net/I-2/177/2012/isprsannals-I-2-177-2012.pdf

http://digitalcommons.ryerson.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1710&context=dissertations

http://www.sciencedirect.com.pros.lib.unimi.it/science/article/pii/S1877050912001603

http://link.springer.com.pros.lib.unimi.it/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4614-5806-7_452

http://data.nasa.gov/srb-data-and-info/

Talking of OBIS SEAMAP, do not just look at the map with the colored cells. You can explore the databases as well and download them; you will notice that some datasets have a huge number of records. Look a bit more in depth at the data available changing the resolution of your grid and other parameters; use this link to the advanced search tool search for the available data http://seamap.env.duke.edu/search a use the "Option" button on the top right-hand corner of the screen to change the settings of your search.