The South Sandwich Islands are the most data deficient place in the UK Oversees Territories, owing to their remote location and difficulty in landing on the islands. Zavodovski island, the northern most of the Archipelago, hosts the largest penguin colony in the world (~600,000 pairs of chinstrap penguins) and the only regionally important population of macaroni penguins outside of South Georgia. The terrestrial biodiversity remains virtually unsurveyed, yet satellite imagery shows extensive geothermally influenced vegetation which is likely to include communities exceptional to the region. Reliable baseline information upon which to build a terrestrial management plan is incomplete. An eruption occurred in March 2016 and resulted in ash covering a third of the island: the impacts of this upon penguin populations and vegetation communities are undocumented. With this project, we were conducting the first terrestrial biodiversity survey on Zavodovski Island.

Zavodovski Expedition