Orben et al. (2025b)

Rachael Orben (Assistant Professor – Senior Research, Oregon State University), Adam Peck-Richardson (Faculty Research Assistant, OSU), and Alexa Piggott (Faculty Research Assistant, OSU) entered the sixth year of the Cormorant Oceanography Project. This interdisciplinary project is developing and deploying novel biologging tags on cormorants, shags, and penguins to collect oceanographic data while gaining insights into seabird ecology (Orben et al., 2025). 2024 continued to be a busy year with tag deployments on cormorant and penguin species across the globe. We supported the tagging effort of seven cormorant and two penguin species in ten different countries (including: Great Cormorants—Sweden, Lithuania, Germany, and Republic of Korea; Guanay Cormorants—Peru; Neotropic Cormorants—Brazil; Temminck’s Cormorants—Republic of Korea; European Shags—Norway; Imperial Cormorants—Argentina; Socotra Cormorants—UAE; African Penguins—South Africa; Humboldt Penguins—Peru). We also continued to work with tag manufacturers (Ornitela) to refine GSP-GSM tags to measure salinity (conductivity + temperature) and to refine tag programming to improve tag power management. The resulting physical oceanography datasets were shared with oceanographers at Oregon State University. OSU researchers Jim Lerczak (Professor), Greg Wilson (Assistant Professor), Jessica Garwood (Assistant Professor), Xiaohui Liuare (Research Associate), and Leilane Passos (Research Associate) are processing bird-derived data to describe water column properties and to calibrate satellite-derived oceanographic models. Deployments with collaborators will continue in 2025 in Lithuania, Norway, Peru, India, Sweden, and Korea. This effort is funded by the Office of Naval Research.
Orben, R., Peck-Richardson, A., Piggott, A., Lerczak, J., Wilson, G., Garwood, J., Liu, X., Muzaffar, S., Foster, A., Naser, H., AlMusallami, M., Anker-Nilssen, T., Arnould, J., Berumen, M., Cansse, T., Cárdenas-Alayza, S., Christensen-Dalsgaard, S., Khamis, A., Carpenter-Kling, T., … Zavalaga, C. (2025). Collaborating with Marine Birds to Monitor the Physical Environment Within Coastal Marine Protected Areas. Oceanography. https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2025e115