Ignacio (Nacho) Juárez Martínez
Seabird Research Advisor
Nacho is a Seabird researcher with more than ten years of experience in the study of seabird behaviour with a conservation goal. His main interest is in the use of new technologies for monitoring the status of seabirds in remote areas of the world. This has taken him to conduct 12 field expeditions across four continents, leading more than half of those. In his research he has discovered previously unknown migration routes and strategies, impacts of climate change as well as those of fisheries and tourism.
My name is Ignacio Juárez Martínez and I am a Biologist and Biochemist from Spain. I am developing a career in Seabird Conservation and in the use of new technologies for ecological monitoring. I have dedicated my PhD (Biology, Oxford) and my latest postdoc position (Oxford Brookes) to studying the impact of Climate Change on three species of penguins in Antarctica and several Sub-Antarctic Islands. Previously, I also dedicated my Masters (MRes Zoology, Oxford) to studying the movement ecology of several shearwaters and auks in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
My interest in seabird research stems from a concern in seabird conservation as well as in broader marine ecology. Seabirds, including penguins, can be exposed to threats at sea anytime over their long lifespans and long breeding cycles, at any point across their broad geographical ranges and through the various trophic levels they feed upon. Seabirds therefore ‘report’ on critical threats that may exist anywhere in their lifecycles by way of changes in their breeding patterns. At the same time seabirds are the only marine animals easy to monitor on land (i.e. at their colonies), so seabirds are considered “ocean sentinels”. A sort of canary in the coal mine that can quickly signal disruptions in the marine ecosystem through the disruption of their own life cycles.
They tend to live in inaccessible places on remote islands, so one must get quite creative in order to study them. For this reason I specialised in the use of state-of-the-art technology for seabird monitoring. During my masters (MRes Zoology, Oxford) I dedicated my research to study several seabird species using GPS, GLS, TDR and accelerometers. I even built and deployed prototype on-board video recorders on Manx shearwaters (Puffinus puffinus). My focus was to study the migration of Hutton’s shearwaters (Puffinus huttoni), leading to the discovery of their wintering and moulting grounds as well as their migratory routes and habits. I also deployed GPS and GLS on Manx shearwaters, Atlantic Puffins (Fratercula arctica), Kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla), Guillemots (Uria aalge) and Razorbills (Alca torda) on Skomer (Wales) and Rùm (Scotland). This allowed me and my collaborators to study several conservation-sensitive aspects of their life-cycle, including foraging ecology, breeding habits, navigation strategies and migratory behaviour.
During my PhD and postdoc, I investigated how climate change has affected the life of several Penguin species (Pygoscelis antarcticus, P. adeliae and P.papua) over the last decade across 40 colonies in Western Antarctica and the Atlantic Sub-Antarctic Islands. I used a network of 77 timelapse cameras and GPS deployments to study how increasing temperatures, precipitation, fisheries and tourism are impacting penguin phenology and breeding performance. I found these factors caused record changes in their reproduction, bringing forward their breeding times beyond any known historical records and causing ever-more-frequent catastrophic breeding failures. My Antarctic research also involves drone surveys to estimate penguin populations (I am a certified drone pilot with more than 200 surveys across three continents).
