All scientific data collected by the Australian Antarctic program (AAp) are eventually described in the Catalogue of Australian Antarctic and Subantarctic Metadata (CAASM). CAASM can be used to search through AAp data descriptions, and it also provides links to access publicly available datasets, which can either be immediately downloaded or obtained from the Australian Antarctic Data Centre (AADC).
An occupancy survey on 21 January 2011 found a total of 7 islands along the Wilkes Land coastline had populations of breeding Adélie penguins. The survey was conducted from a fixed wing aircraft and oblique aerial photographs were taken of each occupied site except Haswell Island. The aerial photographs were geo-referenced to a satellite image and the boundaries of penguin colonies were digitised from the geo-referenced photos. Details for each island are:
Adams: Photographs taken on 21 January 2011 and geo-referenced to a Quickbird satellite image taken on 30 January 2009
Fulmar: Photographs taken on 21 January 2011 and geo-referenced to a WorldView2 satellite image taken on 6 February 2011
Zykov: Photographs taken on 21 January 2011 and geo-referenced to a WorldView2 satellite image taken on 6 February 2011
Buromskiy: Photographs taken on 21 January 2011 and geo-referenced to a WorldView2 satellite image taken on 6 February 2011
Stroitley: Photographs taken on 21 January 2011 and geo-referenced to a WorldView2 satellite image taken on 6 February 2011
Tokarev: Photographs taken on 21 January 2011 and geo-referenced to a WorldView2 satellite image taken on 6 February 2011
Haswell: No photographs taken, no penguin colonies were digitised
Note there are two colony boundary layers in each folder except Adams. One is the original layer mapped as above. The second is an adjusted layer that was created so that the mapped boundaries would land on the exposed rock layer. Mapping of some of the islands contained within the coast layer had been coarsely done using imagery available at the time. Now with more accurate satellite imagery the island mapping could potentially be updated which would more accurately locate these islands. If this occurred, the original colony boundary mapping may be a more appropriate fit.
Please refer to the Seabird Conservation Team Data Sharing Policy for use, acknowledgement and availability of data prior to downloading data.
It was not possible to geo-reference oblique photos to satellite images perfectly. The colony boundaries are less accurate than those derived elsewhere in east Antarctica from vertical aerial photography (eg Vestfolds and Rauers) or ground survey (eg Robinsons).
These data are publicly available for download from the provided URL.
This data set conforms to the CCBY Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Please follow instructions listed in the citation reference provided at http://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/metadata/citation.cfm?entry_id=AAS_4088_Adelie_occupancy_Wilkes_2011 when using these data.
Please refer to the Seabird Conservation Team Data Sharing Policy for use, acknowledgement and availability of data prior to downloading data.
2017-05-01 - record created by Colin Southwell. 2022-10-12 - record updated by Dave Connell to publicly release the data. 2025-11-06 - record updated by Dave Connell - basic updates.