Data from: Differential impacts of wind and waves on albatross flight performance in two ocean basins

This dataset was used to identify the effect of winds and waves on
albatross flight performance, specifically a reliance on wing flaps. It
consists of hourly GPS positions for 370 foraging albatrosses nesting in
Bird Island, South Georgia (Southern Ocean) or Midway Atoll (North
Pacific) during breeding seasons between 2018 and 2023. The dataset
includes identifying characteristics of each albatross, including species,
nesting location, field season, trip type (incubation or brood-guard), and
a unique ID. Study species include black-browed, grey-headed, and
wandering albatrosses at Bird Island, and black-footed and Laysan
albatrosses at Midway Atoll. Windspeed (km/h) and swell height
(m) experienced by foraging birds were extracted from ERA5 hourly data on
single levels (hourly temporal resolution, 0.25x0.25 degree spatial
resolution). Wing flaps per hour were calculated by using LULU filters to
identify peaks in the z-axis of accelerometer data (tags mounted on the
central dorsal contour feathers of the albatrosses. Times where birds were
resting on water were removed from this dataset using Hidden Markov Models
on fine-scale GPS data to ensure that analyses were performed on
albatrosses in flight. Generalized Additive Models were used to identify
the effect of wind speed and wave height predictors on flap rate.