Are Adelie penguin populations across east Antarctica changing?
There is growing evidence that penguin populations are changing substantially in their distribution and abundance in the Antarctic Peninsula in response to environmental change. In contrast, in east Antarctica our ability to reliably infer whether broad-scale changes in penguin populations are occurring over the long term is constrained by the relative lack of time series of population counts. This seminar will describe work over the past five years and still in progress to improve our ability to reliably infer whether broad-scale, long-term change in east Antarctic Adelie penguin populations is occurring or not. The work includes the development and application of new technologies and survey methods to extend existing time series, and the development of a new bootstrap estimation procedure to adjust for biases and quantify uncertainties associated with interpreting historical counts obtained using widely varying methods.
