Life Sciences Commons^™

Stable Isotopes Can Be Used To Infer The Overwintering Locations Of Prebreeding Marine Birds In The Canadian Arctic, Rolanda J. Steenweg, Glenn T. Crossin, T. Kurt Kyser, Flemming R. Merkel, Hugh G. Gilchrist, Holly L. Hennin, Gregory J. Robertson, Jennifer F. Provencher, Joanna M. Flemming, Oliver P. Love

Biological Sciences Publications

Although assessments of winter carryover effects on fitness-related breeding parameters are vital for determining the links between environmental variation and fitness, direct methods of determining overwintering distributions (e.g., electronic tracking) can be expensive, limiting the number of individuals studied. Alternatively, stable isotope analysis in specific tissues can be used as an indirect means of determining individual overwintering areas of residency. Although increasingly used to infer the overwintering distributions of terrestrial birds, stable isotopes have been used less often to infer overwintering areas of marine birds. Using Arctic-breeding common eiders, we test the effectiveness of an integrated stable isotope approach (13-carbon, …