Impact of climate change on seabirds as ecological indicators of Southern Ocean

The current climate change has profound effects that can be observed at all levels of ecosystems, especially in polar systems such as the Southern Ocean and the Barents Sea. Predator populations, such as penguins, can be seen as synthesising the effect of climate change on lower trophic levels. It is therefore timely to analyse adaptive strategies of top predators, especially seabirds, together with climate effects on them, using long-term time series. During this project, we will analysed the data collec ted using free-living and non-banded king penguins, an approach rendered possible by the use of automatic monitoring systems (programme ANTAVIA), enabling us to know the comings and goings of the birds and thus their life-history-traits (age, breeding suc cess) with a lot of details on their breeding cycle (breeding propensity, arrival and laying date, sea-trip length, etc.). In order to understand the processes driving the population changes, we will address the question of life history trade-offs between current reproduction and future reproduction. We will then need to combine data on breeding activity, breeding output, and breeding timing. This will be done during the first month. The second month, we will determine if inter-annual variability in life- history traits and demographic parameters (e.g. breeding success) might be explained by environmental stochasticity and its consequences on food availability.