Coats Island Long-Term Seabird Dataset

Summary:

Long-term monitoring dataset on seabirds at Coats Island (Akpatuurjuaq,ᐊᑲᐸᑑᕋᔦᕋᑲ), with a focus on thick-billed murres (Uria lomvia).

Original purpose of project:

This dataset was initially collected as part of a project launched by the Canadian Wildlife Service in 1981 to monitor the thick-billed murre (Uria lomvia). The summary below is paraphrased from Patterson et al. (2024) which provides a detailed description of the 40+ year research project.

The Coats Island (Akpatuurjuaq,ᐊᑲᐸᑑᕋᔦᕋᑲ) field station began primarily to monitor thick-billed murre (Uria lomvia, akpa, ᐊᑲᐸ) populations in the context of harvest management and federal responsibilities under the Migratory Birds Convention Act (MBCA). Murres are unique within the MBCA as the only seabird with a legal, non-Indigenous hunt and are explicitly exempted from MBCA. The initial purpose was to band birds for 10 years and then record their age-specific trends to develop population parameters to manage the hunt. However, it quickly became evident that the site was uniquely well suited for studying many aspects of murre biology that could provide insights into changing environmental conditions. Hence, the focus shifted to long-term monitoring of murres as an indicator of environmental change in northern Hudson Bay. Each year, a team bands murre adults and chicks for studies of survival rates, makes population counts, and measures chick diet, growth rate, adult mass, and reproductive success. Research at Coats Island has contributed to the thick-billed murre becoming one of the most well-studied seabirds in the world (Gaston and Hipfner 2020). The dataset has become the second-longest individual-based monitoring program for any Arctic bird, and the oldest in the Canadian Arctic. Data were collected annually, with the exception of 1982 and 1983 (the research program started formally in 1984 after an initial pilot visit in 1981), 2012 and 2014 (during the period when the original principal investigator, AJ Gaston, was in the process or retiring and was affected by illness) and 2020 and 2021 (COVID years when outside research was largely forbidden in Nunavut). While the study remains the best on-going information on population parameters relevant to the murre hunt, the study has made many other significant contributions, including (i) the first-ever record of the remarkable diving abilities of auks compared to penguins; (ii) the highest recorded sustained locomotory costs of any animals (flying murres); and (iii) a change in diet from Arctic keystone species (Arctic cod) to temperate species (capelin) implying a large-scale Atlantification of the Arctic.

See "Coats_Metadata_V1_20260425.pdf" file for additional information on the dataset.