Patterns of space use in sympatric marine colonial predators reveal scales of spatial partitioning

Jones, Esther Lane; McConnell, Bernie; Smout, Sophie; Hammond, Philip S.; Duck, Callan; Morris, Christopher M.; Thompson, David; Russell, Debbie J. F.; Vincent, Cécile; Cronin, Michelle; Sharples, Ruth Jemma; Matthiopoulos, Jason

doi:10.3354/meps11370

Cited by 54 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Location estimates can be processed with an SSM (e.g. Kalman filter; KF) to reduce spatial errors [116]. The SSM predicts the current state (location) together with its associated spatial error.…”

Section: Inferring Foraging Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Navigating uncertain waters: a critical review of inferring foraging behaviour from location and dive data in pinnipeds

et al. 2016

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In the last thirty years, the emergence and progression of biologging technology has led to great advances in marine predator ecology. Large databases of location and dive observations from biologging devices have been compiled for an increasing number of diving predator species (such as pinnipeds, sea turtles, seabirds and cetaceans), enabling complex questions about animal activity budgets and habitat use to be addressed. Central to answering these questions is our ability to correctly identify and quantify the frequency of essential behaviours, such as foraging. Despite technological advances that have increased the quality and resolution of location and dive data, accurately interpreting behaviour from such data remains a challenge, and analytical methods are only beginning to unlock the full potential of existing datasets. This review evaluates both traditional and emerging methods and presents a starting platform of options for future studies of marine predator foraging ecology, particularly from location and two-dimensional (time-depth) dive data. We outline the different devices and data types available, discuss the limitations and advantages of commonly-used analytical techniques, and highlight key areas for future research. We focus our review on pinnipeds - one of the most studied taxa of marine predators - but offer insights that will be applicable to other air-breathing marine predator tracking studies. We highlight that traditionally-used methods for inferring foraging from location and dive data, such as first-passage time and dive shape analysis, have important caveats and limitations depending on the nature of the data and the research question. We suggest that more holistic statistical techniques, such as state-space models, which can synthesise multiple track, dive and environmental metrics whilst simultaneously accounting for measurement error, offer more robust alternatives. Finally, we identify a need for more research to elucidate the role of physical oceanography, device effects, study animal selection, and developmental stages in predator behaviour and data interpretation.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40462-016-0090-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Section: Inferring Foraging Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Navigating uncertain waters: a critical review of inferring foraging behaviour from location and dive data in pinnipeds

et al. 2016

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“…Interactions between different factors and indirect effects may cause particular difficulties in identifying key individual drivers (Jones et al, 2015;Sharples et al, 2012). Interactions between different factors and indirect effects may cause particular difficulties in identifying key individual drivers (Jones et al, 2015;Sharples et al, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the Moray Firth, grey seals and harbour seals are sympatric, sharing the same haulout sites in summer , when there is also partial overlap in foraging grounds (Jones et al, 2015). Counts of grey seals hauling out in the area during the time of the harbour seal moult started in 2006.…”

Section: Grey Seal Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Use of state‐space modelling to identify ecological covariates associated with trends in pinniped demography

Caillat

Cordes

Thompson

et al. 2019

Aquatic Conservation

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1. Identifying and understanding ecological drivers that influence wildlife populations is challenging but critical for conservation. This typically requires integrating longterm data on both the population and potential drivers within statistical models that are suitable for analysing these complex relationships. State-space models offer one method for integrating such data. Once implemented within a Bayesian framework, these analyses can control for multifactorial influences on populations, allowing one to extract otherwise undetectable correlations between the environment and the underlying, inferred demography.2. In the Moray Firth, Scotland, harbour seals have been counted annually for 30 years . A Bayesian state-space model was used to explore whether patterns in vital rates were correlated to changes in prey abundance, inter-specific competition (grey seal abundance), environmental variables [the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and sea-surface temperature], or level of biotoxins (saxitoxin and domoic acid) in the Moray Firth waters.3. The credible interval of the posterior distributions of three of these covariate coefficients (sandeel proxy, NAO and grey seal abundance) suggested that there was a relationship between those covariates and vital rates. Both the sandeel proxy and NAO showed a positive correlation with fecundity, whereas grey seal abundance had a negative impact on pup survival.4. This work demonstrates how an integrated state-space modelling approach can bring together diverse data sets and point to important interactions with prey, and with other predators in the system. This suggests that the wider-scale management of UK harbour seal populations with their contrasting temporal trends needs to account for variation in the marine ecosystem at appropriate spatial scales, in line with current policy concerning spatial planning in the marine environment.

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“…The potentially competing seal species (Jones et al, 2015) show a high future overlap, with a predicted 18% increase with very little decrease in overlap in present areas (<2%, Figure 1). This could be due to the fact that, although both seal species have similar negative relationships with PEA, our models' estimates have quite different relationships with NPP and opposite relationships with CHL.…”

Section: Local and Common Space Percentage Loss Or Gainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecological costs of climate change on marine predator–prey population distributions by 2050

Sadykova

Scott

Dominicis

et al. 2020

Ecology and Evolution

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Identifying and quantifying the effects of climate change that alter the habitat overlap of marine predators and their prey population distributions is of great importance for the sustainable management of populations. This study uses Bayesian joint models with integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) to predict future spatial density distributions in the form of common spatial trends of predator-prey overlap in 2050 under the "business-as-usual, worst-case" climate change scenario. This was done for combinations of six mobile marine predator species (gray seal, harbor seal, harbor porpoise, common guillemot, black-legged kittiwake, and northern gannet) and two of their common prey species (herring and sandeels). A range of five explanatory variables that cover both physical and biological aspects of critical marine habitat were used as follows: bottom temperature, stratification, depth-averaged speed, net primary production, and maximum subsurface chlorophyll. Four different methods were explored to quantify relative ecological cost/benefits of climate change to the common spatial trends of predator-prey density distributions. All but one future joint model showed significant decreases in overall spatial percentage change. The most dramatic loss in predator-prey population overlap was shown by harbor seals with large declines in the common spatial trend for both prey species. On the positive side, both gannets and guillemots are projected to have localized regions with increased overlap with sandeels. Most joint predator-prey models showed large changes in centroid location, however the direction of change in centroids was not simply northwards, but mostly ranged from northwest to northeast. This approach can be very useful in informing the design of spatial management policies under climate change by using the potential differences in ecological costs to weigh up the trade-offs in decisions involving issues of large-scale spatial use of our oceans, such as marine protected areas, commercial fishing, and large-scale marine renewable developments.

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Patterns of space use in sympatric marine colonial predators reveal scales of spatial partitioning

Cited by 54 publications

References 55 publications

Navigating uncertain waters: a critical review of inferring foraging behaviour from location and dive data in pinnipeds

Navigating uncertain waters: a critical review of inferring foraging behaviour from location and dive data in pinnipeds

Use of state‐space modelling to identify ecological covariates associated with trends in pinniped demography

Ecological costs of climate change on marine predator–prey population distributions by 2050

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