There is also direct predation by humans on an industrial scale, with seabird eggs for food, their guano as fertilizer, the birds themselves for oil, along with seals, sea lions and whales, or unwanted by commercial fisheries. Collected as bycatch. boat. In the Farallon Islands near San Francisco, the largest single seabird colony in the United States, murre populations fell from 400,000 to 60,000 in just a few decades of the gold rush. People harvested up to 500,000 eggs a year.

The Farallon Islands are now protected as part of a marine sanctuary, and nesting seabird colonies are recovering, helping to sustain the surrounding marine ecosystem, including great white sharks. Great white sharks are apex predators that sometimes feed on northern fur seal populations that have returned to the sea. Since the islands were protected. Rhinoceros beetles, puffin companions, have also returned. Twenty endangered species live on and around the island, including birds, reptiles, insects, marine mammals and even sea turtles..

the comeback has already started

And hundreds of other seabird restoration projects around the world are showing signs of success, he said. Dena Spats,the scientist Pacific Rim Conservation, a non-profit organization focused on ecosystem restoration.Spatz was lead author on the April 10 paper study In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Data collected from 851 restoration projects in 36 countries covering 138 seabird species over the last 70 years.

The new study focused on aggressive efforts to restore bird populations, including social lure methods such as the use of decoys and the direct migration of juveniles to new locations free of invasive predators. In more than 75% of restoration work, the target species visited the site and began breeding within two years.

“This is an incredible success story,” she said. “Many seabirds return without intervention … but this is not always the case.”

Some populations of seabirds were small and widely dispersed on distant islands, and some of them blinked and disappeared. As such, it will be difficult to bring bird populations back to historic breeding levels without help.

“That’s where proactive restoration, moving things from one place to another, becomes very important,” she said.

Restoring seabirds could strengthen marine ecosystems and their ability to capture carbon dioxide, he said. Hans Otto Peltnera climate scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, who recently co-authored the research paper chemistry It details the relationship between biodiversity, ecosystem protection and climate stabilization.

In addition to direct CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and other industrial processes, ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss also contribute significantly to the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that heat the planet. There are, he said.

“Biodiversity loss contributes to climate change through loss of wild species and biomass,” the paper concludes. “This reduces carbon storage and absorption capacity in natural and managed ecosystems, increasing emissions.”

The resulting warming will disrupt ecosystems, creating a vicious cycle that exacerbates the “unprecedented loss of biodiversity already caused by human habitat degradation, overexploitation of natural resources and pollution”. He and his co-authors write in the paper. chemistry paper.

Continuing biodiversity loss and habitat loss, coupled with projected greenhouse gas emissions, puts the planet on track to rise to nearly 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, and humans will not It will not change unless we proceed on Earth in a way that makes it possible. It incorporates an enhancement of the natural pathways of carbon binding and storage,” said Peltner.

Can Migration Assistance Help?

The new seabird restoration study is part of a growing canon documenting thousands of different restoration projects on each continent, according to the report. restorera non-profit network building a global restoration database.

Spatz said restoring seabirds could help reverse biodiversity loss and carbon sequestration, adding some of the translocation studies pioneered by New Zealand scientists to other regions. But he explained that it would help in similar efforts. The idea of ​​physically moving birds from one location to another to restore populations is part of a growing effort. Migration assistance, some scientists believe this will become important as the impacts of climate change intensify. For seabirds, she says, this is best done in species that have evolved to return to where they were born.

“There are amazing biological responses in birds such as petrels, petrels, albatrosses and puffins,” she says. “They are born on islands, leave their nests, go out to sea for one to eight years, depending on the species, and then return to where they were born.”

She said the chicks’ movements are timed so that they settle in their new homes in the same way they would normally do where they were hatched.

“It’s a lot of effort to do something like this, but it works,” she said. “Amazingly, these birds come to restoration sites as fluffy chicks and are raised by humans, but leave no trace of them on us. No, they sprout wings and fly out to sea under their own power, and when it’s time to breed, they go to the restoration site instead of where they were born.”

In Hawaii, he said, scientists are moving albatross and petrel chicks from some of the lowlands of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, home to huge bird colonies, but some of the nesting grounds are already inundated by sea level rise. It is said that there is

“It’s not a threat to the future,” she said. “That’s the current threat. If we hadn’t adopted them, those chicks probably wouldn’t have survived.”

Thrive ecosystems to benefit the climate

Scaling up efforts to restore and conserve nature, including seabirds, is absolutely critical to prevent the worst consequences of global warming, he said. Bernie Tarseya researcher in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“A big part of that is getting pollutants out of the air, right? Some might argue it’s about planting,” said Tarsey, who is not the author of the new seabird study, but has worked on similar studies.

But that would be like putting all the eggs of climate change in one basket, he said, adding that wildfires, insect infestations, and other factors would quickly wipe out these monocultures before they could benefit climate change. Explained possible risks. A better approach is to diversify investments across ecosystems that suck carbon out of the atmosphere.

“It’s also completely the cheapest way, because it’s passive,” he said. “All you have to do is protect these natural areas and manage them properly. They will absorb huge amounts of carbon and do so with incredible resilience.” .”

But you can’t just focus on a single species, he added.

“We need a lot of different plant species,” he said. “And you also need insect herbivores and fertilizer-producing species. You need small mammals to disperse seeds, and you also need birds to disperse seeds and the fertilizers they grow their seeds from. Carbon from the atmosphere. We need all the biodiversity to maintain resilient ecosystems that pull out.”