Between a rock and a large place: the importance of multi-scale geomorphological features to seabird nest site selection.

Abstract

The importance of habitats to animal, and, in particular, bird conservation, has long been recognized (Martin et al. 2007, Yorio 2009, Oppel et al. 2018). From the study of habitat has emerged the importance of geodiversity (Hjort et al. 2015, Hunter et al. 2017, Malcolm and Hunter 2017). The relationship between geodiversity and biodiversity is a fundamental, yet often-overlooked aspect of ecology; for example, we recently demonstrated that several seabird species show preferences for particular small natural features of potential nest sites (Eveillard-Buchoux et al. 2019 and Fig. 1).