Historical Adelie penguin breeding population estimates in the Australian Antarctic Territory

These historical abundance data may, in their original published form, have inherent unrecognised and therefore unaccounted biases and uncertainties that could confound reliable interpretation. Developing approaches to improve interpretation of historical data may therefore allow a more reliable assessment of extremely valuable long-term abundance data. This dataset contains details of over 200 historical estimates of Adelie penguin breeding populations across the Australian Antarctic Territory (AAT) that have been published in the scientific literature.

The details include attributes of the population count (date and year of count, count value, count object, count precision) and the published estimate of the breeding population derived from those attributes, expressed as the number of breeding pairs. In addition, the dataset contains revised population estimates that have been re-constructed using new estimation methods to account for detection bias as described in the associated publication.

All population data used in this study were sourced from existing publications.