Long-term monitoring of marine ecosystem sentinel species : The French Southern Breeding Seabird Survey

• Main Authors: Delord, Karine, Cherel, Yves, Weimerskirch, Henry, Collet, Julien, Bonnet, Timothée, Barbraud, Chistophe
• Other Authors: Centre d'Études Biologiques de Chizé - UMR 7372 (CEBC), La Rochelle Université (ULR)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE), Nelson Mandela University Port Elizabeth
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2023
• Subjects: [SDE]Environmental Sciences; Antarctic; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-04256281; https://hal.science/hal-04256281/document; https://hal.science/hal-04256281/file/Poster_Euring2023_Delord.pdf; https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.28820.88965

Long-term ecological datasets are pivotal to evaluate changes that affect the structure and functioning of ecosystems due to environmental variations. It is now established that we are facing a period of rapid climate change due to human activities and that we shall face even more rapid changes during the 21st century. This change in climate is accompanied with increasing human activities such as fisheries or habitat variations that are already affecting marine ecosystems. Therefore, understanding processes through which these changes affect seabirds and marine ecosystems has become a major issue for ecologists. In addition it is the prerequisite to be able to make robust projections on future impacts. The research program of our team in the French Southern Territories uses seabirds as indicators of global changes in the marine ecosystems of the Southern Ocean. Through a network of four observatories from the Antarctic to sub-tropical biomes, started in the late 1950s, the populations of ~25 species of marine top predators and their distribution at sea are monitored. Individual based long-term information (capture-mark-recapture, tissue sampling, bio-logging, phenotypic sampling), combined with continuous records of population sizes, at-sea survey and with specific studies carried out on an annual base, are used to describe temporal trends and to understand the processes though which climate and human induced environmental stressors affect seabird populations and marine ecosystems. Then three main types of data have enriched the database: demographic, tracking and more recently stable isotopes. These processes are integrated in population models to make scenarii on the effects of future environmental changes on Southern Ocean seabirds, as well as to propose conservation measures to limit the impact of fisheries and introduced predators on populations. All these information are today centralized in a long-term database on the demography and spatial distribution of Southern Ocean top predators, making a unique ...