Climate change, fisheries and invasive species represent three pervasive threats to seabirds, globally. Understanding the relative influence compounding nature of marine terrestrial on demography seabird communities is vital for evidence-based conservation. Using 20 years capture-mark-recapture data from four sympatric albatross (black-browed Thalassarche melanophris , gray-headed T. chrysostom...

Recent concern about negative effects on human health from elevated organochlorine and mercury concentrations in marine foods has highlighted the need to understand temporal and spatial patterns of marine pollution. Seabirds, long-lived pelagic predators with wide foraging ranges, can be used as indicators of regional contaminant patterns across large temporal and spatial scales. Here we evalua...

Database systems serving cloud platforms must serve large numbers of applications (or tenants). In addition to managing tenants with small data footprints, different schemas, and variable load patterns, such multitenant data platforms must minimize their operating costs by efficient resource sharing. When deployed over a pay-per-use infrastructure, elastic scaling and load balancing, enabled by...

Among the varied adaptations for avian flight, the morphological traits allowing large-bodied albatrosses to capitalize on wind and wave energy for efficient long-distance flight are unparalleled. Consequently, the biogeographic distribution of most albatrosses is limited to the windiest oceanic regions on earth; however, exceptions exist. Species breeding in the North and Central Pacific Ocean...

The Amsterdam albatross (Diomedea amsterdamensis) is one of the rarest bird species of world avifauna, consisting of a single population in the upland plateau of Amsterdam Island (SE Indian Ocean). All breeding birds of the population are today banded and a monitoring program involving mark-recapture procedures has been carried out continuously over the past 16 years. We present the first estim...

Dynamic Soaring is a flying technique which extracts energy from an environment where wind gradients form, with the potential to increase the endurance of small unmanned vehicles. The feasibility to use dynamic soaring flight is questioned here; it requires the identification of energy-extraction mechanisms as well as accurate understanding of the way energy-harvesting performances are governed...