Effects of human environmental changes on storm petrel populations

Project Information

Grant agreement ID: HPMF-CT-2002-01617

Project closed

Start date 1 March 2002

End date 27 February 2004

Funded under

• Programme for research, technological development and demonstration on "Improving the human research potential and the socio-economic knowledge base" (1998-2002)

Total cost € 114 272,00

EU contribution € 114 272,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
United Kingdom

Objective

The project will study the effects of human changes to the environment on the demography of storm petrels. These human influences include, beside others, light pollution (storm petrels are strictly nocturnal as a defense against diurnal predators) and altered predation rates due to increases in number of predators. These altered predation rates occur when, for example, scavenging seabirds (such as gulls and skuas) are forced to switch diet to predation as a consequence of reductions in discarding by fisheries. Storm petrels are also highly vulnerable to introduced mammals (rats, cats). Many of these small seabird populations are vulnerable to the effects that result from human activities, and conservation of storm petrels requires better understanding of impacts and measures that can be taken in mitigation. We will study several colonies of storm petrel species to compare these direct and indirect human effects. Although patterns on predation have been described, the quantitative relationship between human activities and predation impacts are not known. The project will quantify this relationship, and will analyze demographic parameter of storm petrel populations and resulting populations trends as a consequence of predation impact.

Fields of science

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.

• natural sciences › biological sciences › zoology › ornithology
• social sciences › sociology › demography
• natural sciences › earth and related environmental sciences › environmental sciences › pollution
• natural sciences › biological sciences › biological behavioural sciences › ethology › biological interactions
• natural sciences › biological sciences › zoology › mammalogy

Programme(s)

• FP5-HUMAN POTENTIAL - Programme for research, technological development and demonstration on "Improving the human research potential and the socio-economic knowledge base" (1998-2002)

Topic(s)

Data not available

Call for proposal

Data not available

Funding Scheme

RGI - Research grants (individual fellowships)

Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

• EU contribution: No data
• Address: University Avenue, Graham Kerr Building ; G12 8QQ GLASGOW ; United Kingdom
• Total cost: No data