Using satellite imagery, in the first time an entire species have been tracked from space, an international team of scientists has been using high resolution satellite images from space to count penguins. They have found that there are twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica than previously thought.
UK, US and Australian scientists used satellite technology to trace and count the iconic birds, finding them to number almost 600,000.
Their census technique relies in the first instance on locating individual colonies, which is done by looking for big brown patches of guano (penguin poo) on the white ice.
High resolution imagery is then used to work out the number of birds present.
It is expected that the satellite mapping approach will provide the means to monitor the long-term health of the emperor population.
