Fig. 1 Extent of published seabird tracking data on the Great Barrier Reef. Displayed GBR seabird breeding sites qualify under globally or regionally significant seabird breeding areas.

Here, we collate the most comprehensive tropical seabird tracking dataset from across the globe to train ENMs, describing foraging niche and to estimate tropical seabird foraging radii. Firstly, we determine whether breeding seabird foraging niches can be transferred (predicted) between global colonies using ENMs. We investigate the influence of local adaptation on transferability by testing whether nearby or oceanographically similar colonies show better transferability, and whether this can be overcome by training ENMs on multiple colonies to generalise a ‘global’ foraging niche. Secondly, we present a framework combining ENMs with the foraging radius approach to refine foraging circles by excluding areas of predicted unsuitable habitat. We validate our framework’s robustness by testing the ability of unrefined and refined foraging circles to include known foraging areas of colonies from our global tracking dataset. Finally, we demonstrate how global models can inform local planning by applying our framework to the breeding seabird community of the Great Barrier Reef to identify a network of candidate MPAs for seabirds, and explore the trade-off between their size and the confidence in their prediction.