Effects of human activity on Gentoo penguins on Macquarie Island

This project empirically measures the effects of human activity on the behaviour and reproductive success of Gentoo penguins on Macquarie Island. This was achieved by 1) collecting behavioural responses of individual penguins exposed to pedestrian approaches across the breeding stages of guard, creche and moult, and 2) collecting reproductive success data (chicks raised to creche age per nesting pair) for gentoo penguins colonies in areas of high and low human activity. 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).

This work was carried out as part of ASAC project 1148 (ASAC_1148).

The fields in this dataset are:

Sample Date Breeding Phase Stimulus Type Colony Focal birds tape number Wide angle tape number Location within colony Weather Time Windspeed Temperature Precipitation Cloud Pre-approach control Approach Post-approach control Maximum approach distance