Marine Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas for penguins in Antarctica, targets for conservation action.

Handley, J.; Rouyer, M-M.; Pearmain, E.J.; Warwick-Evans, V. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0583-5504; Teschke, K.; Hinke, J.; Lynch, H.; Emmerson, L.; Southwell, C.; Griffith, G.; Cardenas, C.A.; Franco, A.M.; Trathan, P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6673-9930; Dias, M.P.. 2021 Marine Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas for penguins in Antarctica, targets for conservation action. Frontiers in Marine Science, 7, 602972. 17, pp. 10.3389/fmars.2020.602972

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Text (Open Access) Copyright © 2021 Handley, Rouyer, Pearmain, Warwick-Evans, Teschke, Hinke, Lynch, Emmerson, Southwell, Griffith, Cárdenas, Franco, Trathan and Dias. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. fmars-07-602972.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (7MB) | Preview

Abstract/Summary

Global targets for area-based conservation and management must move beyond threshold-based targets alone and must account for the quality of such areas. In the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, a region where key biodiversity faces unprecedented risks from climate change and where there is a growing demand to extract resources, a number of marine areas have been afforded enhanced conservation or management measures through two adopted marine protected areas (MPAs). However, evidence suggests that additional high quality areas could benefit from a proposed network of MPAs. Penguins offer a particular opportunity to identify high quality areas because these birds, as highly visible central-place foragers, are considered indicator species whose populations reflect the state of the surrounding marine environment. We compiled a comprehensive dataset of the location of penguin colonies and their associated abundance estimates in Antarctica. We then estimated the at-sea distribution of birds based on information derived from tracking data and through the application of a modified foraging radius approach with a density decay function to identify some of the most important marine areas for chick-rearing adult penguins throughout waters surrounding Antarctica following the Important Bird and Biodiversity Area (IBA) framework. Additionally, we assessed how marine IBAs overlapped with the currently adopted and proposed network of key management areas (primarily MPAs), and how the krill fishery likely overlapped with marine IBAs over the past five decades. We identified 63 marine IBAs throughout Antarctic waters and found that were the proposed MPAs to be adopted, the permanent conservation of high quality areas for penguin species would increase by between 49 and 100% depending on the species. Furthermore, our data show that, despite a generally contracting range of operation by the krill fishery in Antarctica over the past five decades, a consistently disproportionate amount of krill is being harvested within marine IBAs compared to the total area in which the fishery operates. Our results support the designation of the proposed MPA network and offer additional guidance as to where decision-makers should act before further perturbation occurs in the Antarctic marine ecosystem.

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	10.3389/fmars.2020.602972
ISSN:	2296-7745
Additional Keywords:	Marine Protected Area, Fisheries, Spheniscidae, Pygoscelis, Aptenodytes, CCAMLR, Marine IBA
Date made live:	01 Feb 2021 11:04 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/529419

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