Effects of human activity on Royal penguins on Macquarie Island

This project empirically measures the effects of human activity on the behaviour, heart rate and egg-shell surface temperature of Royal penguins on Macquarie Island, as part of ASAC project 1148. This was achieved by collecting behavioural and physiological responses of individual penguins exposed to pedestrian approaches across the breeding stages of incubation, guard, creche and moult. Both single person and group approaches were also investigated. Information produced includes minimum approach guidelines. As of April 2003 all data are stored on Hi-8 digital tape, due to be transformed during 2003 - 2004 into a timecoded tab-delimited text format for analysis using the Observer (Noldus Information Technology 2002).Some notes about some of the fields in this dataset:Temp file refers to whether or not egg shell surface temperature was also recorded for the sample, with the code below refering to the file name.Neighbour refers to the behavioural control file for each sample (neighbouring nests did not recieve an artificial egg, and provide a behavioural control for responses to human approaches without the scientific treatment).Nest refers to the randomly used nest markers for each sample.Heart rate refers to whether heart rate was concurrently recorded with behaviour on the sample (both stored on Hi-8 tape).Stimulus refers to whether single persons or groups of persons (5 -7, recorded within each sample) were used for the human approaches.Environment refers to whether approaches were conducted from colony sections abuting pebbly beach or from poa tussock environs (tussock approaches less than 50 m of the poa / pebbly beach junction).The code system for nest simply refers to the numbered tag placed at the nest (using three colours, g=green, w=white, b=brown) which were used randomly.The fields in this dataset are:SampleDateBreeding PhaseStimulus TypeEnvironmentColonyNestTapeHeart RateTemp FileNeighbour