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Marine predators are an important component of marine trophic webs, and their decline has important consequences on whole ecosystem dynamics. Understanding their movements and habits is vital for conservation, yet extremely challenging. Tracking technologies, coupled with a robust, reproducible, and quantitative analytical framework, are being used to successfully identify Important Conservation Areas (ICAs) for seabirds, which are wide-ranging and declining marine predators. However, the identification of such areas is skewed towards large-bodied seabird species, and there are few marine ICAs for small-bodied birds like storm petrels. We GPS-tracked Mediterranean Storm Petrels Hydrobates pelagicus melitensis breeding in northwestern Sardinia over three consecutive breeding seasons (2019–2021), and we applied a recently proposed analytical framework for the assessment of ICAs using GPS data. We identified an area of 40638 km2 in the central Mediterranean Sea that spans three different national marine jurisdictions and partially falls within the Pelagos Sanctuary for Mediterranean Marine Mammals. In these ICAs, a range of human activities take place (e.g., fishing activities, maritime traffic, tanker maritime routes), particularly in the neritic zones. Despite the relatively low human presence in the area, the human impact on the Mediterranean Sea is predicted to increase in future years, with important consequences for conservation. International cooperation to identify ICAs at the basin scale is needed, given the trans-national nature of storm petrel movements. Here, we describe the polygon of the identified ICAs for the Italian population of Mediterranean Storm Petrel we studied (available for download) to help inform marine spatial planning and target the conservation and protection of the species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Australia's response to Britain's 1961-63 bid to join the European Community has been examined in almost every possible detail, Australian policy towards Britain's 1970-72 application has drawn very little scholarly attention. This article therefore aims to fill this gap by drawing on newly released archival material from the National Archives of Australia in Canberra and the National Archives in London. In doing so, the article examines the impact of Britain's 1971-72 application to join the EC on Australian policy and the Anglo-Australian relations. It argues that while far from provoking the same widespread uproar as the Macmillan government's original application in 1961, Britain's final bid had important political and economic implications for Australian foreign policy.