| Summary: | © The Author(s), 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Nature Communications 7 (2016): 11842, doi:10.1038/ncomms11842. Defining reliable demographic models is essential to understand the threats of ongoing environmental change. Yet, in the most remote and threatened areas, models are often based on the survey of a single population, assuming stationarity and independence in population responses. This is the case for the Emperor penguin Aptenodytes forsteri, a flagship Antarctic species that may be at high risk continent-wide before 2100. Here, using genome-wide data from the whole Antarctic continent, we reveal that this top-predator is organized as one single global population with a shared demography since the late Quaternary. We refute the view of the local population as a relevant demographic unit, and highlight that (i) robust extinction risk estimations are only possible by including dispersal rates and (ii) colony-scaled population size is rather indicative of local stochastic events, whereas the species’ response to global environmental change is likely to follow a shared evolutionary trajectory. This study was undertaken within the framework of the Programme 137 of the Institut Polaire Français Paul-Emile Victor (IPEV), with additional support from the French National Research Agency (ANR) ‘PICASO’ grant (ANR-2010-BLAN-1728-01, PI: Y.L.M.), from Marie Curie Intra European Fellowships (FP7-PEOPLE-IEF-2008, European Commission; project no. 235962 to CLB and FP7-PEOPLE-IEF-2010, European Commission; project no. 252252 to E.T.), from the Centre Scientifique de Monaco through budget allocated to the Laboratoire International Associé 647 ‘BioSensib’ (CSM/CNRS-University of Strasbourg), from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Programme Zone Atelier de Recherches sur l’Environnement Antarctique et Subantarctique) and from the British Antarctic Survey Ecosystems Programme, NERC (P.N.T.). Logistic ...
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