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Marine Important Bird Areas
Marine Important Bird Areas will help protect seabirds when they are away from their breeding colonies
BirdLife International's Important Bird Areas programme looks to identify and protect a network of sites critical for the long-term health of bird populations.
The Important Bird Areas programme began on land (and included seabird colonies) but is now being extended to the marine environment.
Four kinds of Important Bird Areas cover seabirds away from their breeding colonies, and these are:
- critical at sea areas used by ocean-going species
- migration bottlenecks
- non-breeding (coastal) congregations
- seaward extensions to breeding colonies to include major foraging areas
The work to identify marine Important Bird Areas is helping other global initiatives to protect and sustainably manage the oceans, including helping to create Marine Protected Areas.
BirdLife Partners in Portugal, Malta, Greece, Italy, Spain, New Zealand, and the Baltic Sea states of Latvia and Estonia are leading the way in identifying, delineating and designating marine Important Bird Areas for a wide variety of seabird species.
In Spain and Portugal, tracking studies and surveys from ships/planes have been used to identify foraging areas used by breeding seabirds. Working out where these seabirds go helps to identify where Important Bird Areas should be.
Last modified: 26 February 2010