Impacts of anthropogenic environmental change on Southern Rockhopper Penguin demography and behaviour

This PhD will investigate how environmental variability influences the foraging behaviour and demographics of the Southern Rockhopper Penguin (Eudyptes chrysocome) at multiple colonies within the Falkland Islands. This species has declined rapidly in recent times, with mass mortality events believed to be connected to changes in sea temperatures and food availability.

Given environmental stochasticity is predicted to increase into the future under anthropogenic climate change, and the Falkland Islands represent a major stronghold for this species, this provides an opportunity to investigate how environmental variability influences behaviour and demography in this iconic predator.

Human-induced rapid environmental change presents multiple major threats to many organisms; and improving our understanding of organisms' (in)ability to adapt to these changes is an increasingly central component of ecological and evolutionary research. For example, warming ocean conditions, overfishing, and increases in extreme weather events, together with their knock-on impacts on prey distributions and availability, represent major threats to seabird populations.

As apex predators, these species are regularly deployed as indicators of the health of our marine environments, yet the relative importance of different environmental mechanisms as drivers of behavioural and population change can be highly variable among systems. Such bottom-up and top-down processes can also vary temporally and spatially, adding further complexity.

However, improving our understanding of the relative importance and potential interactions between different environmental variables is essential for understanding species' potential responses at the individual- and population-level. In turn this can inform broader marine spatial planning and achieve ecosystem-based management goals.

This multidisciplinary project will utilise new and archival data stretching back over 10-years from multiple colonies around the Falkland Islands to determine: 1) at-sea behaviour via biologging devices (e.g. GPS and time-depth tags) 2) foraging preferences using stable isotope, DNA metabarcoding and regurgitate analyses 3) demographic parameters (e.g. breeding success, population size) and timings, and will 4) combine these data through state of the art statistical modelling.

Ultimately, this project will allow us to make important scientific and applied contributions through:

- Developing an understanding of the key anthropogenic influences driving demographic and behavioural changes in the marine environment.

- Informing Falkland Islands Marine Managed Areas and improving environmental impact assessments for current, and future, extractive industries through enhancing our understanding of past and current impacts on a charismatic predator.