Pupils p-p-pick up praise for penguin find

A new penguin colony has been discovered in the Antarctic - thanks to a group of pupils more than 10,000 miles away at Stirling High School.

A study conducted as part of the British Antarctic Survey revealed there are almost 20 per cent more emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica than previously thought.

Inspired by a David Attenborough programme on the plight of penguins, the students wanted to investigate whether colonies could be located using freely available satellite imagery and processing software.

As part of their involvement in a project with the Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS), they worked in their own time to develop and code an algorithm to identify penguin colonies from the satellite imagery.

This inspired professional researchers and geographers at the British Antarctic Survey to use a higher resolution satellite to find emperor penguin colonies. They “acknowledge the impetus give to the project” by the work of the students in their final published research paper.

Dr Peter Fretwell and Philip Trathan, the geographers and researchers for the British Antarctic Survey, uncovered the penguin colony using Sentinel-2.

Young researchers from the Stirling High School used the same satellite mapping technology as part of an IRIS project called Earth Observation.

In Peter and Philip’s co-authored research paper about the findings published in the Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation, they wrote:

“We would also like to acknowledge the impetus given to the project by Dr Andrew Mcdonald and the pupils of Stirling High School whose initial experiments with Sentinel-2 and penguins inspired PTF to use the higher resolution satellite to find emperor penguin colonies.”

Dr Andrew Mcdonald, from Stirling High School, said: “The pupils worked in their own time to develop and code an algorithm to identify penguin colonies from the satellite imagery. To be acknowledged in a peer-reviewed paper was a great boost to the group and showed that it is possible to perform meaningful real science in schools.”

The study found a number of colonies located far offshore, situated on sea ice that has formed around icebergs that had grounded in shallow water. These colonies, up to 180 km offshore, are a surprising new finding in the behaviour of this increasingly well-known species.

Dr Phil Trathan, head of conservation biology at BAS, has been studying penguins for the last three decades. He said: “Whilst it’s good news that we’ve found these new colonies, the breeding sites are all in locations where recent model projections suggest emperors will decline.

“Birds in these sites are therefore probably the

‘canaries in the coalmine’ – we need to watch these sites carefully as climate change will affect this region.”