Adelie Penguin Colony Boundaries at Nelly Island from 1990 Aerial Survey

Nelly Island Adelie Penguin Colonies is a vector GIS layer showing the boundaries of all extant Adelie penguin colonies at Nelly Island, Windmill Islands, Antarctica. The dataset was created by the Australian Antarctic Data Centre (AU_AADC) as part of ASAC project 1219, with data collected in December 1990. Colony extents were digitized from georeferenced Linhof aerial photographs.

Use Cases

• Analyze colony spatial distribution and adjacency using the polygon boundary features.
• Assess historical penguin habitat occupancy by overlaying the colony vector layer with other environmental GIS datasets.
• Study changes in colony extent over time by comparing these 1990 boundaries with more recent survey data.
• Digitize colony centroids from the polygon features for point-based population density modeling.

Strengths

• Colony boundaries are digitized to a precision within approximately 0.5 meters of their location within the source photographs.
• Data includes all extant Adelie penguin colonies at the specified location and time.

Limitations

• Positional discrepancies in the source aerial photographs are up to 2.4 meters, and absolute georeferencing errors cannot be quantified.
• Data quality cannot be accurately assessed according to the source description.
• Dataset represents a single snapshot from December 1990, limiting temporal analysis.

Provenance

Source

Australian Antarctic Data Centre (AU_AADC), ASAC project 1219.

Collection Method

Colony boundaries digitized from Linhof aerial photographs (ANTC1219, run 53, frames 5-7) georeferenced to the Windmill Islands Topopoly GIS dataset.

Time Range

December 1990.

Freshness

1990-12-17

Geography

Nelly Island, Windmill Islands, Antarctica.