Media write about UMaine-led study involving seabirds, climate change and Falkland Islands

CosmosViceEurasia ReviewCourthouse News Service, Mirage and the Natural History Museum wrote about a University of Maine-led study exploring how seabird responses to climate change 5,000 years ago transformed the Falkland Islands. A 14,000-year paleoecological reconstruction of the sub-Antarctic islands created by researchers found that seabird establishment occurred during a period of regional cooling 5,000 years ago. Their populations, in turn, shifted the Falkland Islands ecosystems through the deposit of high concentrations of guano that helped nourish tussac, produce peat and increase the incidence of fire. “One of the main reasons why seabirds are so cool is because they are so sensitive to changes that are happening in the ocean, where they are getting their food from, and also the land where they are breeding or building their nests,” said Dulcinea Groff, who led the research as a UMaine Ph.D. student in ecology and environmental sciences, and part of a National Science Foundation-funded Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Research Traineeship (IGERT) in Adaptation to Abrupt Climate Change (A2C2), to Vice. Groff, now a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Wyoming, and his colleagues published their findings in a paper in the journal Science Advances. “We know that many seabirds in the South Atlantic rely on these unique coastal grasslands, but it turns out that the grasses also depend on the nutrients seabirds provide,” said Jacquelyn Gill, study co-author and an associate professor of paleoecology and plant ecology in the UMaine Climate Change Institute, to Cosmos. “Because they rely on ecosystems in the ocean and on land for their survival, seabirds are really good sentinels of global change.” Gill led expeditions to the Falkland Islands in 2014 and 2016, during which the study was conducted. MecroPress, ScienceDaily, earth.com, Hindi Khabre, Space Force, Everydaynews, BuradaBiliyorum.Com and SciTechDaily also highlighted the study.