Global warming is a nonlinear process, and temperature may increase in a stepwise manner. Periods of abrupt warming can trigger persistent changes in the state of ecosystems, also called regime shifts. The responses of organisms to abrupt warming and associated regime shifts can be unlike responses to periods of slow or moderate change. Understanding of nonlinearity in the biological responses to ...

Reproductive timing in many taxa plays a key role in determining breeding productivity, and is often sensitive to climatic conditions. Current climate change may alter the timing of breeding at different rates across trophic levels, potentially resulting in temporal mismatch between the resource requirements of predators and their prey. This is of particular concern for higher-trophic-level organisms, ...

In seasonal environments, organisms are expected to optimally schedule reproduction within an annual range of environmental conditions. Latitudinal gradients generate a range of seasonality to which we can expect adaptations to have evolved, and can be used to explore drivers of timing strategies across species’ distribution ranges. This study compares the timing of egg hatching in four seabird ...

Aim An understanding of the non-breeding distribution and ecology of migratory species is necessary for successful conservation. Many seabirds spend the nonbreeding season far from land, and information on their distribution during this time is very limited. The black-legged kittiwake, Rissa tridactyla, is a widespread and numerous seabird in the North Atlantic and Pacific, but breeding ...

This is the third annual report of the SEAPOP programme, which was initiated in 2005. In 2007, the work continued at full scale in the Lofoten-Barents Sea area, and similar studies were initiated in the southern part of the Norwegian Sea. The report is divided into three sections. The first is an executive summary, the second presents five selected highlights from the studies in 2007, whereas the ...

During breeding, long-lived species face important time and energy constraints that can lead to breeding failure when food becomes scarce. Despite the potential implications of intra-season dynamics in breeding failure for individual behavior, carry-over effects, dispersal decisions and population dynamics, little information is currently available on these dynamics at fine temporal scales. Here, ...