Monitoring Antarctic breeding flying seabirds with nest cameras – a consideration for extending CEMP

Antarctic seabirds are important indicator species for CCAMLR's ecosystem monitoring program (CEMP) to identify and assess impacts and change in Southern Ocean ecosystems and to manage the krill fishery taking account of the needs of krill-consuming predators. Previously, focus for the use of remotely-operating time-lapse cameras as a tool for cost-effective, large-scale monitoring tool for CEMP has been on penguins. Here we describe progress towards their use for monitoring cape and Antarctic petrels to deliver data on: 1) breeding phenology, 2) breeding success, 3) inter-annual changes in a population size index, and 4) adult attendance curves to develop adjustment factors to standardise whole-colony population counts made at sub-optimal times. The approach in using cameras for monitoring these two flying seabird species are similar to the penguins although interpreting time-series of counts made of adults and chicks from camera images requires an understanding of their differing ecologies and population dynamics. We propose that by including flying seabirds in addition to penguins in the nest camera network, it should be possible to quantify spatio-temporal variation in breeding and population response parameters for a suite of species to enhance the existing CEMP both spatially and through additional species.