The current warming of the oceans has been shown to have detrimental effects for a number of species. An understanding of the underlying mechanisms may be hampered by the non-linearity and non-stationarity of the relationships between temperature and demography, and by the insufficient length of available time series. Most demographic time series are too short to study the effects of climate on ...

Climate variability influences seabird population dynamics in several ways including access to prey near colonies during the critical chick-rearing period. This study addresses breeding success in a Barents Sea colony of common guillemots Uria aalge where trophic conditions vary according to changes in the northward transport of warm Atlantic Water. A drift model was used to simulate interannual ...

Climate change and other human activities are causing profound effects on marine ecosystem productivity. We show that the breeding success of seabirds is tracking hemispheric differences in ocean warming and human impacts, with the strongest effects on fish-eating, surface-foraging species in the north. Hemispheric asymmetry suggests the need for ocean management at hemispheric scales. For the north, ...

In migratory birds, environmental conditions in both breeding and non-breeding areas may affect adult survival rates and hence be significant drivers of demographic processes. In seabirds, poor knowledge of their true distribution outside the breeding season, however, has severely limited such studies. This study explored how annual adult survival rates of black-legged kittiwakes Rissa tridactyla ...

In many seabird studies, single annual proxies of prey abundance have been used to explain variability in breeding performance, but much more important is probably the timing of prey availability relative to the breeding season when energy demand is at a maximum. Until now, intraseasonal variation in prey availability has been difficult to quantify in seabirds. Using a state-of-the-art ocean ...

Predicting the impact of global climate change on the biosphere has become one of the most important efforts in ecology. Ecosystems worldwide are changing rapidly as a consequence of global warming, yet our understanding of the consequences of these changes on populations is limited. The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) has been used as a proxy for “climate” in several ecological studies, but this ...

Tracking data of marine predators are increasingly used in marine spatial management. We developed a spatial data set with estimates of the monthly distribution of 6 pelagic seabird species breeding in the Northeast Atlantic. The data set was based on year-round global location sensor (GLS) tracking data of 2356 adult seabirds from 2006−2019 from a network of seabird colonies, data describing the ...