Our ANTSIE masters student Josie Francis has successfully published a new database of snow petrel distributions around Antarctica. Supervised by Professor Stewart Jamieson and Dr Ewan Wakefield, Josie updated the 1995 database led by John Croxall by undertaking literature searches, contacting snow petrel researchers directly, and working her way through the British Antarctic Survey archives of field reports. The result is a superb overview of snow petrel distributions!
Josie also pushed the database further, by drawing on her GIS skills first honed during her Geography undergraduate degree at Durham, to explore the relationships between snow petrel distributions and both sea ice cover and the conditions at the nesting sites. This work is helping to support our work to understand where and why snow petrels were breeding in the past.
Josie was supported by the European Research Council grant “ANTSIE” and a Polar Scholarship awarded through the Department of Geography, Durham University.
Francis, J., Wakefield, E., Jamieson, S. S. R., Phillips, R. A., Hodgson, D. A., Southwell, C., Emmerson, L., Fretwell, P., Bentley, M. J., & McClymont, E. L. (2025). A circumpolar review of the breeding distribution and habitat use of the snow petrel (Pagodroma nivea), the world’s most southerly breeding vertebrate. Polar Biology, 48(1), Article 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-024-03336-8