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.