A collaboration between the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and BirdLife International, the atlas covers an area of about three million square kilometres from southern Brazil to southern Chile. It was put together using hundreds of thousands of individual uplinks from satellite transmitters fitted to 16 different marine bird and mammal species over a ten-year period. The data were used to create accurate maps of the ecosystem, including migratory corridors between the coast and deep-sea feeding areas.

The Patagonian Sea is increasingly threatened by development and overfishing, and the atlas’s authors hope that it will lead to the protection and management of key areas.

‘This unprecedented atlas was essentially written by the wildlife that lives in the Patagonian Sea,’ said Dr Claudio Campagna of the WCS. ‘The atlas helps fill in many gaps of knowledge and should serve as
a blueprint for future conservation efforts in this region.’

February 2010