The process of Important Bird Area identification in Antarctica was initiated in 2002 as joint project between BirdLife and the Bird Biology Sub-committee of Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) with the aim of documenting all sites which meet IBA selection criteria on the Antarctic continent. Coverage also includes the South Orkney and South Shetland Islands and a number of other small, offshore islands such as the Ballenys. Excluded, however, are the sub-Antarctic islands as these are already included in other regional IBA programmes. Two workshops were held at which groups of international experts assessed all available data on the breeding bird populations of the region against IBA citeria and thresholds, and came up with a provisional list of sites for the region.

More recently, BirdLife has been working with Environmental Research and Assessment to update and refine this list and to map and document in detail qualifying sites. As a result, 101 IBAs have been identified on the Antarctic Peninsula, South Shetland and South Orkney Islands, for 14 of the 20 species that breed in the continent. These include breeding colony sites for all five species of penguin that occur in the region: Emperor, Aptenodytes forsteri, Adélie Pygoscelis adeliae, Gentoo P. papua, Chinstrap P. antarctica and Macaroni Eudyptes chrysolophus.

The report for the IBAs of the Antarctic Peninsula is available for download at

http://www.birdlife.org/datazone/userfiles/file/IBAs/AntPDFs/IBA_Antarctic_Peninsula.pdf. Meanwhile plans are in hand to extend the process of updating the provisional site list and so compile site account data for the remainder of the continent.

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