© Benedict Wilson
Puffin are a burrow nesting species which means they nest, lay their eggs and raise their chicks underground making the monitoring of their breeding success challenging without causing disturbance.
This project seeks to develop technology which samples organic compounds within puffin borrows and transmit this data to a central hub for population modelling.
In addition to this, through identifying unique puffin odour signatures, the data can then be used detect discrepancies that occur with this signature. Changes which could be associated with the presence of disease like HPAI, invasive non-native predators, changes in food supply and the presents of chicks – all to assess the overall health of the burrow.
In 2021 SMEEF was able to provide a grant of £131,240 to support this work using resources donated to SMEEF by businesses.