An Albatross Census From Space
Researchers are using high-resolution satellite images to count the large birds on remote islands.
Peter Fretwell has never been to the remote islands off the coasts of Argentina and New Zealand where albatross make their homes, but he has seen hundreds of them.
Well, he’s seen hundreds of tiny, pixelated white dots against a greenish-brown background on a computer screen. That’s how albatross—white seabirds known for their wingspans—appear in images taken by a high-resolution camera on a satellite orbiting Earth. Fretwell, along with his colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey and the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand, used these images to scour the landscape of
