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- Progressing delineations of key biodiversity areas for seabirds, and their application to management of coastal seasPublication . Handley, Jonathan; Harte, Emma; Stanworth, Andrew; Poncet, Sally; Catry, Paulo; Cleminson, Sacha; Crofts, Sarah; Dias, MariaAim: Decision-making products that support effective marine spatial planning are essential for guiding efforts that enable conservation of biodiversity facing increasing pressures. Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) are a product recently agreed upon by an international network of organizations for identifying globally important areas. Utilizing the KBA framework, and by developing a conservative protocol to identify sites, we identify globally importants places for breeding seabirds throughout the coastal seas of a national territory. We inform marine spatial planning by evaluating potential activities that may impact species and how a proposed network of Marine Management Areas (MMAs) overlap with important sites. Location: Southwest Atlantic Ocean. Methods: We collated a national inventory of all breeding locations for seabirds, including abundance records where available, and complementary estimates of at-sea distribution. We delineated areas of importance in coastal seas following approaches tailored to the ecology of species and assessed areas against global KBA criteria. To determine opportunities for species conservation and management, we reviewed which human activities have been documented to impact the target species globally via IUCN Red List accounts, and also assessed the overlap of important sites with a proposed MMA network. Results: We identified global KBAs for nine seabird species (Anatidae, Diomedeidae, Laridae, Procellariidae, Spheniscidae, Stercorariidae) throughout national coastal seas. Globally important areas where multiple species overlapped were only partially accounted for in key zones of the proposed MMA network. Main Conclusions: Development of a conservative protocol to identify marine sites for assessment against KBA criteria, revealed opportunities for enhancing a network of proposed Marine Management Areas in coastal seas. The framework we apply in this study has broad relevance for other systems where the design or review of management plans for the marine environment is required.
- Local-scale impacts of extreme events drive demographic asynchrony in neighbouring top predator populationsPublication . Ventura, Francesco; Stanworth, Andrew; Crofts, Sarah; Kuepfer, Amanda; Catry, PauloExtreme weather events are among the most critical aspects of climate change, but our understanding of their impacts on biological populations remains limited. Here, we exploit the rare opportunity provided by the availability of concurrent longitudinal demographic data on two neighbouring marine top predator populations (the black-browed albatross, Thalassarche melanophris, breeding in two nearby colonies) hit by an exceptionally violent storm during one study year. The aim of this study is to quantify the demographic impacts of extreme events on albatrosses and test the hypothesis that extreme events would synchronously decrease survival rates of neighbouring populations. Using demographic modelling we found that, contrary to our expectation, the storm affected the survival of albatrosses from only one of the two colonies, more than doubling the annual mortality rate compared to the study average. Furthermore, the effects of storms on adult survival would lead to substantial population declines (up to 2% per year) under simulated scenarios of increased storm frequencies. We, therefore, conclude that extreme events can result in very different local-scale impacts on sympatric populations. Crucially, by driving demographic asynchrony, extreme events can hamper our understanding of the demographic responses of wild populations to mean, long-term shifts in climate.