LuMinAves: cooperative research and mitigation of light pollution impacts in seabirds

Abstract

Any efforts to conduct a sustainable management of urban and natural landscapes benefit from an interdisciplinary approach and active collaboration between actors, thus increasing the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed actions. With the emergent transition of urban lighting to white LED technology, such shifts can bring a variety of negative effects to these environments, thus such actions should be applied taking into account as broad a knowledge set as available. These are often fragmented and incoherent thus in need of actions which unite them into usable and common tools. In the North Atlantic region of Macaronesia, a project has been implemented which uses the negative effects light pollution has on seabird populations as a base to effect changes in the regional lighting schemes, decreasing light pollution and increasing the sustainability of the current LED transition, improving practices and awareness, to the benefit of both seabirds and human populations alike.

Keywords

• sustainable lighting
• collaborative actions
• seabird ecology
• urban light pollution
• citizen-science