Leach’s petrels are red‑listed in the UK following substantial population declines across the North Atlantic. Despite their conservation status, key demographic parameters such as survival remain poorly quantified. This project developed and tested a non‑invasive, audio‑based deep‑learning framework for identifying individual Leach’s petrels at breeding colonies from existing, acoustic recordings, collected by RSPB over 5 years from St Kilda.
As a result of the project, a set of recommendations have been produced for future data collection, and next steps to ensure challenges with sample quality are minimised going forwards. The audio-based deep-learning framework developed from this project will be used to assess inter-annual occupancy of burrows by Leach’s petrel individuals and thereby allow the estimation of apparent local annual survival probability. This will allow RSPB to calculate the inter-annual survival rate for Leach’s petrels at St Kilda, the most important UK colony, where the population has suffered a severe decline.
In 2025 SMEEF was able to provide a grant of £23,464 to support this work using resources from the Nature Restoration Fund.