Penguin Watch EY

Research Overview

Seabirds are declining worldwide under threat of climate change, pollution, disturbance and competition with fisheries. We want to monitor, understand and protect these species, but we have lacked the ability to collect data on a large enough scale. The Penguin Watch EY research project aims to understand these threats and to reverse them through informing policy changes.

Many seabirds are considered a sentinel of change. A sentinel species is an organism that can be used to alert us of environmental risks to key ecosystems. Seabirds spend most of their life at sea and are near the top of the food chain. Changes in their populations are likely to reflect changes occurring in the wider ecosystem, making them excellent indicators of the health of the marine environment. Seabirds, such as the Adélie penguin, show very different trends in their populations between East and West Antarctica, where they may be experiencing different environmental conditions and threats.

Above: Dr Tom Hart checking one of the camera traps at an Gentoo penguin colony in Antarctica.

Using data from images captured from time lapse cameras positioned around Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, the Penguin Watch research project specifically aims to::

1. Determine chick survival and breeding success, and how this varies across species ranges and between years
2. Identify the causes of chick mortality (e.g. predation in the colony versus parents abandoning chicks)
3. Record changes in the timing of breeding (e.g. arrival date, fledging date) and how this is affected by environmental conditions

The team has spent the last 10 years putting cameras around Antarctica and the Southern Ocean to monitor the annual breeding and reproductive success of penguins. We also use drones to count colonies and we pick up poo and feathers to monitor disease, diet and stress.

Amplifying citizen science through AI

However, annotating the wealth of photographic information collected can be prohibitively time consuming for researchers alone and the camera network must rely on an efficient method to process the large flow of data to remain viable as it grows. Citizen science provides an answer to this conundrum as it can dramatically improve the efficiency of the data processing and alleviate the time-consuming problem of image annotation. The citizen scientists are tasked with tagging photos of nesting birds by identifying adults, eggs and chicks on thousands of images collected in the field. The citizen scientists are playing a key role in activating and maintaining the network and, in so doing, gain an opportunity to engage nature whilst supporting important conservation objectives.

Yet, manually reviewing the huge volume of photos taken by our growing camera network (now 150 cameras) is becoming prohibitively time consuming even for citizen scientists. As such, the development of our network must go hand in hand with the development of an automated approach (or artificial intelligence - AI) to support our volunteer citizen scientists. Their responses are now being fed into a computerised machine learning process that will eventually enable demographic data to be extracted from the image archive. The process of developing artificial intelligence remains on-going. Ultimately, the goal is to develop an AI to not only filter and annotate the bank of images but also extract useful breeding parameters such as the timing of breeding (phenology) and breeding success (productivity). The AI will eventually become adept at annotating the images without further ‘training’ and the citizen scientists can be employed to perform a validation role for the AI’s findings or re-training the AI on new sites and species.

Protecting penguin habitat and establishing no-fishing zones

Your classifications will have a long-term impact on both the penguin population and our environment; the classifications will better train machine learning models which will be used long after you are done classifying, and will continuously improve as more data is inputted.

Our research will feed into policy as we build evidence to determine important regions for penguins and highlight specific colonies of concern. There is growing support for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) around parts of the Antarctic Peninsula, which would help protect penguins by managing human activities.

In recent years, with the help of thousands of citizen scientists, we have informed the design and subsequent extension of the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands Marine Protected Area which include a no-fishing zone, as well as the designation of the Danger Islands Archipelago as Antarctic Specially Protected Area.

Threats to Antarctic species

Antarctica is the world’s highest, driest, coldest and windiest continent, and is home to a range of exceptional species. However, there is growing concern over this unique ecosystem and the risks it faces from climate change, fisheries and direct human disturbance.

Over the latter part of the twentieth century, the Antarctic Peninsula has been among the most rapidly warming parts of our planet and this is causing significant reductions in sea ice and the collapse of ice shelves. This has important consequences for species living in these areas and for the management of local fisheries.

Penguins are used by scientists as indicators of change within their ecosystem because, as an easy-to-monitor species, any change in their breeding performance or population size and distribution are likely to reflect changes to species lower down the food chain, or in the Antarctic environment as a whole. Therefore, monitoring these species will provide valuable insight into the large-scale changes occurring.

Above: Gentoo penguins looking after their chicks.

Field work

Penguin Watch project voluntarily complies to the British Standard BS 8848: Specification for the provision of visits, fieldwork, expeditions and adventurous activities outside the United Kingdom.

Support a Penguinologist!

We depend on generous donations to run our research and expedition. In addition to supporting with our data analysis, you can also help us by donating or fundraising:

• from anywhere in the world: https://www.development.ox.ac.uk/penguins
• from North America: https://www.oxfordna.org/donate