Bird habitat surveys conducted during the 2004/05 summer and descriptive information of the terrestrial environment in the Mawson region

This type of information is generally collected during geological surveys. This metadata record gathers a range of descriptive geomorphological information of various nature: -Habitat surveys were conducted in the season 2004-2005 in the Mawson area in parallel with bird nest mapping (reported in metadata record SNPEMAWSON0405) in order to study selection of nest sites by a range of species.

Habitat was described in the survey sites searched for bird nests following various methods (described in). Information is stored as GIS files (Arcview 3.2 or ArcGIS): -polygon shapefile gathering all the geomorphological units describing % substrate cover -A collection of digital photos showing the sites searched for bird nests, most if them indexed by grid site number. The grid sites numbers are located in a shapefile of 200*200m sites, below) -A set of Digital Elevation Models (DEM) covering the entire Mawson area generated for 5 separate regions and the derived slope, aspect, aspect to the prevailing winds, convexity raster files at a 10m resolution -200m*200m grid created from the coverage of ice-free areas (from Aerial photography) providing site boundaries and numbers for the photographic database -A series of Black and White and colour aerial Photos scanned at high resolution for the purpose of substrate study and associated 3D images.