Wind is fundamentally related to shelter and flight performance: two factors that are critical for birds at their nest sites. Despite this, airflows have never been fully integrated into models of breeding habitat selection, even for well-studied seabirds. Here, we use computational fluid dynamics to provide the first assessment of whether flow characteristics (including wind speed and turbulence) predict the distribution of seabird colonies, taking common guillemots Uria aalge breeding on Skomer Island as our study system. This demonstrates that occupancy is driven by the need to shelter from both wind and rain/wave action, rather than airflow characteristics alone. Models of airflows and cliff orientation both performed well in predicting high-quality habitat in our study site, identifying 80% of colonies and 93% of avoided sites, as well as 73% of the largest colonies on a neighbouring island. This suggests generality in the mechanisms driving breeding distributions and provides an approach for identifying habitat for seabird reintroductions considering current and projected wind speeds and directions.

中文翻译：

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气流模型预测海鸟跨岛屿繁殖栖息地


风从根本上与庇护和飞行性能有关：这两个因素对于鸟类在筑巢地点至关重要。尽管如此，气流从未完全融入繁殖栖息地选择模型中，即使对于经过充分研究的海鸟也是如此。在这里，我们以斯科默岛上常见的海鸠Uria aalge繁殖作为我们的研究系统，利用计算流体动力学首次评估流动特征（包括风速和湍流）是否可以预测海鸟群体的分布。这表明，入住率是由躲避风雨/波浪作用的需要驱动的，而不仅仅是气流特征。气流和悬崖方向模型在预测我们研究地点的高质量栖息地方面均表现良好，识别出 80% 的群落和 93% 的回避地点，以及邻近岛屿上 73% 的最大群落。这表明驱动繁殖分布的机制具有普遍性，并提供了一种考虑当前和预计的风速和方向来确定海鸟重新引入栖息地的方法。