Location and Dates of Meetings

The Ninth Meeting of ACAP’s Advisory Committee (AC9) will be held from Monday, 9 May to Friday, 13 May 2016, in Chile.  Chile became a Party to the Agreement in December 2005.

Pink-footed Shearwater, a Chilean breeding endemic and ACAP's most recently listed species, photograph courtesy of Fardela Blanca

The location of the meeting venue will be advised in AC9 Meeting Circular 2.  Meetings of the Population and Conservation Status Working Group and Seabird Bycatch Working Group will precede AC9, at the same venue.  These meetings will be held from Monday, 2 May to Friday, 6 May 2016.  A Heads of Delegation meeting will be convened on Sunday, 8 May 2016 in the evening.  

Meeting Documents

The deadlines for submission and distribution of meeting documents for AC9 and the Working Groups meetings follow:

2 January 2016.  Draft agenda for AC9 distributed

1 February 2016.  New items for inclusion in the agenda submitted to Secretariat 

9 March 2016.  AC9 Working Papers and abstracts for Working Group documents requiring translation submitted to Secretariat

9 March 2016.  Revised draft agenda for AC9 distributed

28 March 2016.  Information papers and documents for Working Group meetings submitted to Secretariat

8 April 2016.  Meeting documents distributed in the working languages by the Secretariat
Meeting documents will not be accepted after these dates.  It would be appreciated if participants could advise the Secretariat of any papers that they intend submitting to the meeting as soon as possible.

Applications for Observer Status

The deadlines for submission of requests for Observer status to attend AC9 are:

8 February 2016:  Submission of written requests for observer status by international bodies

9 March 2016:  Submission of written requests for observer status from non-international bodies

9 March 2016.  International bodies advised if their request for observer status has been approved

8 April 2016.  Non-international bodies advised if their request for observer status has been approved

Information on registration and other meeting arrangements will be provided in Meeting Circular No 2.

The First Session of the Meeting of the Parties to ACAP, held in Hobart, Australia in 2004 established an Advisory Committee to provide expert advice and information to ACAP Parties, the Secretariat and others. Click here to access reports and documents of previous meetings of ACAP’s Advisory Committee.  The previous meeting (the 8th) was held in Punta del Este, Uruguay in September 2014.

ACAP Secretariat, 28 September 2015

Rachel Buxton (Department of Zoology and Centre for Sustainability, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand) and colleagues have published in the Journal of Wildlife Management on monitoring burrowing petrels, utilizing field data from the Grey-faced Petrel Pterodroma macroptera gouldi.

The paper’s abstract follows:

“Burrow-nesting petrels (order Procellariiformes) are keystone species in island ecosystems, where they modify habitat through guano deposition and burrow digging.  Burrowing petrels are among the most threatened groups of birds, yet robust long-term monitoring data remain scarce because of the financial and logistical constraints of working on offshore breeding islands, the variety of surveying strategies used, and the birds’ below-ground breeding behavior.  We examined the sampling requirements of monitoring programs to detect changes in the number of breeding pairs of gray-faced petrels (Pterodroma gouldi), a common species in northern New Zealand.  We first examined the relationship between burrow entrance density and breeding pair density using 4 years of data from 3 large colonies.  We then conducted a simulation-based power analysis to assess the ability of different burrow-occupancy sampling regimes to detect changes in breeding bird abundance.  Power to detect change was influenced by population growth rates, initial bird density, interannual variation in abundance, plot size, number of plots, intervals between surveys, time of year surveys are undertaken, and duration of the monitoring program.  Our analyses suggest that, under the most suboptimal monitoring conditions, at least 45 randomly assigned 5-m-radius plots surveyed annually during the incubation period for 20 years will be required to detect a 1% annual change in breeding bird abundance.  Because power will vary depending on project specifications, local conditions, and potential change, we created an online application with over 50,000 combinations of starting parameters (https://landcare.shinyapps.io/petrels).  This allows managers to determine the power of different combinations of survey intensities while maintaining consistency and maximizing efficiency.”

Grey-faced Petrel, courtesy of Sabine's Sunbird

With thanks to Rachel Buxton.

Reference:

Buxton, R.T., Gormley, A.M., Jones, C.J., Lyver, P.o’B. 2015.  Monitoring burrowing petrel populations: a sampling scheme for the management of an island keystone species.  Journal of Wildlife Management DOI: 10.1002/jwmg.994.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 29 September 2015

Michelle Reynolds (Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center, U.S. Geological Survey, Hawaii, U.S.A.) and colleagues have published in the open-access online journal PloS ONE on the risk sea-level rise imposes on seabirds on the low-lying atolls in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

The paper’s abstract follows:

More than 18 million seabirds nest on 58 Pacific islands protected within vast U.S. Marine National Monuments (1.9 million km2).  However, most of these seabird colonies are on low-elevation islands and sea-level rise (SLR) and accompanying high-water perturbations are predicted to escalate with climate change.  To understand how SLR may impact protected islands and insular biodiversity, we modeled inundation and wave-driven flooding of a globally important seabird rookery in the subtropical Pacific.  We acquired new high-resolution Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) and used the Delft3D wave model and ArcGIS to model wave heights and inundation for a range of SLR scenarios (+0.5, +1.0, +1.5, and +2.0 m) at Midway Atoll.  Next, we classified vegetation to delineate habitat exposure to inundation and identified how breeding phenology, colony synchrony, and life history traits affect species-specific sensitivity.  We identified 3 of 13 species as highly vulnerable to SLR in the Hawaiian Islands and quantified their atoll-wide distribution (Laysan albatross, Phoebastria immutabilis; black-footed albatross, P. nigripes; and Bonin petrel, Pterodroma hypoleuca).  Our models of wave-driven flooding forecast nest losses up to 10% greater than passive inundation models at +1.0 m SLR.  At projections of + 2.0 m SLR, approximately 60% of albatross and 44% of Bonin petrel nests were overwashed displacing more than 616,400 breeding albatrosses and petrels.  Habitat loss due to passive SLR may decrease the carrying capacity of some islands to support seabird colonies, while sudden high-water events directly reduce survival and reproduction.  This is the first study to simulate wave-driven flooding and the combined impacts of SLR, groundwater rise, and storm waves on seabird colonies.  Our results highlight the need for early climate change planning and restoration of higher elevation seabird refugia to prevent low-lying protected islands from becoming ecological traps in the face of rising sea levels.”

Low-lying colony of Black-footed and Laysan Albatrosses

Click here for a press release on the publication and here for an earlier item on sea level rise and albatrosses in ACAP Latest News.

Reference:

Michelle H. Reynolds, M.H., Courtot, K.N., Berkowitz, P., Storlazzi, C.D., Moore, J. & Flint, E. 2015.  Will the effects of sea-level rise create ecological traps for Pacific island seabirds?  PloS ONE DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0136773.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 27 September 2015

Tanya Haupt (Department of Environmental Affairs, Oceans and Coasts Branch, Roggebaai, South Africa) and colleagues have reported in the journal Antarctic Science on the role of Wandering Albatrosses Diomedea exulans on Marion Island on providing a warm environment in their nests for moth caterpillars.

The paper’s abstract follows:

“On sub-Antarctic Marion Island, wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) nests support high abundances of tineid moth, Pringleophaga marioni, caterpillars.  Previous work proposed that the birds serve as thermal ecosystem engineers by elevating nest temperatures relative to ambient, thereby promoting growth and survival of the caterpillars.  However, only 17 days of temperature data were presented previously, despite year-long nest occupation by birds.  Previous sampling was also restricted to old and recently failed nests, though nests from which chicks have recently fledged are key to understanding how the engineering effect is realized. Here we build on previous work by providing nest temperature data for a full year and by sampling all three nest types.  For the full duration of nest occupancy, temperatures within occupied nests are significantly higher, consistently by c. 7°C, than those in surrounding soils and abandoned nests, declining noticeably when chicks fledge.  Caterpillar abundance is significantly higher in new nests compared to nests from which chicks have fledged, which in turn have higher caterpillar abundances than old nests.  Combined with recent information on the life history of P. marioni, our data suggest that caterpillars are incidentally added to the nests during nest construction, and subsequently benefit from an engineering effect.”

A male Wandering Albatross stands over its chick, Albatross Valley, Prince Edward Island, photograph by John Cooper

Click here to read about an earlier paper on this theme.

Reference:

Haupt, T.M., Sinclair, B.J., Shaw, J.D.  & Chown, S.L. 2015.  Further support for thermal ecosystem engineering by wandering albatross.  Antarctic Science DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0954102015000383.

John Cooper, ACAP Information Officer, 25 September 2015