Seabirds of Western Australia: A sense of place in the Indian Ocean region

Public Lecture | Updated 10 years ago

A Pacific Gull swimming in the shoreline
Pacific Gull
Photograph courtesy of Peter Mortimer

Presented by Ron Johnstone, Curator Ornithology, Western Australian Museum

Part of the WA Museum’s 2014 In the Wild West Lecture Series

Seabirds are great bio-indicators of the marine environment from the equator to the poles. The Indian Ocean is the third largest ocean covering 20% of the earth’s surface. Over the past 40 years there have been dynamic changes in the distributions, status and abundance of many of the seabirds occurring in Western Australia and the eastern Indian Ocean region including Indonesia, Christmas and Cocos-Keeling Islands, the Timor Sea, the Southern Ocean and the sub-Antarctic.

The Western Australian region has an extremely rich seabird fauna including a mixture of residents, non-breeding visitors and some of the most important seabird rookeries in the world. Join Ron Johnstone and John Darnell as they provide an overview of our sense of place in this region, and look at some of the historical changes in the birdlife including the invasion southwards of many tropical species and the impacts of climate change and humans on our marine avifauna.

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