Young tracking seabird ranges and climate change in remote Palmyra Atoll
In the middle of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, situated nearly 1,000 miles south of the Hawaiian Islands, Palmyra Atoll is an ocean wilderness teeming with rare animal and plant life.
Thanks to President Obama, half of the monument’s boundaries have been extended from 50 miles to 200 miles from shore. Last month, the president used his Antiquities Act authority to expand the monument to a total of nearly 500,000 square miles, making it the largest marine preserve in the world. It also presents unparalleled research opportunities for UC Santa Barbara marine scientists.
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Palmyra’s islands create a miniature ecosystem, allowing researchers to explore how ecosystems work. “These islands are just the right size to ask questions about the basic underlying properties of an ecosystem,” said Hillary Young, an assistant professor in UCSB’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology (EEMB). “These islands are small enough that we can really understand them as an entire ecosystem yet large enough to be a realistic proxy for large-scale continental systems.”
At the PARC research station on Palmyra, Young tracks seabird movement and their connections to both land and sea. She and UCSB’s Douglas McCauley, also an assistant professor in EEMB, want to understand how the seabirds’ ranges are likely to alter due to climate change — and thus how well the protected area will serve in the future.
“We’ve found that when these land-sea connections are disrupted, the whole terrestrial ecosystem falls apart,” Young explained. “Diversity goes down and rates of nutrient cycling, abundance of animals and food chain length all decrease. Everywhere we look things dramatically shift. These changes trickle back into the marine system.”