Report of the Working Group on Seabird Ecology (WGSE)

The ICES Working Group on Seabird Ecology met from 15 to19 March 2010 at ICES HQ, Copenhagen. Chaired by Jim Reid (UK), eight participants attended the meeting with remote contributions from a further five; eight nations were represented.The objective of the meeting was to consider nine Terms of Reference and to make recommendations for further action where appropriate. With more Terms of Refer-ence than attendees, and no work carried out intersessionally, not all Terms of Refer-ence given the group were addressed at the meeting and some were not addressed in as much detail as would have been preferred. Each attendee largely worked on one chapter of the report, although contributions to all chapters were made by most of the group and feedback was offered in regular plenary sessions. Issues addressed by the Terms of Reference included seabird bycatch in fisheries, an OSPAR Ecological Qual-ity Objective for seabird populations, a report of case studies of the tracking of sea-birds using data loggers, a review of literature on the associations between foraging seabirds and other top predators, a review of progress with the identification of ma-rine Special Protection Areas for seabirds, and a consideration of the possible conse-quences of climate change on parasites hosted by seabirds.