Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Stephanie Jenouvrier
CIRES Visiting Fellow
2009-2010

Project title: Antarctic seabird Population responses to future climate changes.

Stephanie Jenouvrier is a French scientist working on the ecological impact of climate change. Her main interest is to understand and predict the population responses of Antarctic seabirds to present and future climate changes, and to compare responses among others seabirds species.

While at CIRES, she is working with Julienne Stroeve and Mark Serreze at the National Snow and Ice data Center and Marika Holland at the National Center of Atmospheric research to obtain past and future climate data.
These will be used to project the population responses of penguins and petrels.

In Antarctica, seabird species are sensitive to change in sea ice conditions because sea ice affects their food resource and/or their habitat. For instance, winters with extensive sea ice enhance krill abundance and seabirds mainly feed on fish species that depend on krill and other crustaceans. Sea ice affects the demographic traits of penguins and petrels, and thus their population dynamics.

Most of the climate models used in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) project that sea ice will shrink in future global warming scenarios. This may strongly affect Antarctic species, as Jenouvrier et al. (2009) showed for the emperor penguin in Terre Adélie. Indeed, the median population size of the emperor penguin is projected to decline from approximately 6000 to 400 breeding pairs by 2100 if winter sea ice extent declines at the rates projected by IPCC AR4 models.

For more information visit her webpage at http://www.whoi.edu/people/sjenouvrier

Selected publications:

• Jenouvrier S. Caswell H. Barbraud C. Holland M. Stroeve J. Weimerskirch. H. 2009. Demographic models and IPCC climate projections predict the decline of an emperor penguin population.
  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106: 1844-1847
• Jenouvrier S. Barbraud C. and Weimerskirch. H. 2005. Long-term contrasted responses to climate of two Antarctic seabirds species. Ecology, 86:2889-2903.
• Jenouvrier S. Weimerskirch. H. Barbraud C. Park Y-H. and Cazelles B. 2005. Evidence of a shift in cyclicity of Antarctic seabirds dynamics link to climate. Proceedings of the Royal Society, 272: 887-895.

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