David
Irons
US Fish and Wildlife Service

David Irons is the Alaska Seabird Coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. He also serves as Chair for the Circumpolar Seabird Group (CBird), which is a subject-expert group of the international organization, Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF). He is Chair of the Organizing Committee for the first World Seabird Conference (September 2010), and an adjunct professor with University of Alaska Anchorage.

David came to Alaska in 1976 from Penn State to work as an assistant on a sea otter project on Attu Island, where he spent many cold hours underwater in leaky dry suits counting sea urchins and other benthic invertebrates. He received his MS from Oregon State University in 1982. With his attention switching from marine mammals and the nearshore community to seabirds and the marine ecosystem, David received his PhD from UC Irvine in 1992. His work throughout Alaska has focused on seabird foraging behavior and ecology and population changes related to food availability and climate change.

Recently he has been working with seabird scientists from the circumpolar Arctic to investigate the effects of climate change at the circumpolar scale. He is currently working on creating the first Global Seabird Colony Database and a Global Seabird Information Network, as well as many ongoing field studies. Results of his work are published in many peer-reviewed journal articles.