Penguins in a changing environment

The Southern Ocean is a rapidly changing environment facing multiple threats, such as fishing and sea ice change. These threats overlap in space and time and are often influenced by each other. Despite modern technology and 100 years of study, we don’t have a good enough understanding of population trends and threats to penguins. We use time-lapse cameras to monitor what is happening to the timing of breeding and reproductive success. We now face a huge data challenge, which we are overcoming with machine learning and Penguin Watch – a citizen science project that you can participate in!

Antarctic science has traditionally involved building a scientific base to solve the logistical challenges of working in a remote setting. However, in order to monitor penguins all around the Southern Ocean, we have had to turn to alternative methods…namely hitchhiking on ships, and camping. We describe the sorts of challenges we face when living amongst the penguins, such as “what shall we have for dinner?”, “how do we go to the toilet in a blizzard?”, and “what do we do when the Nutella is frozen?” We hope this will be an informative talk with lots of base toilet humour.