Second progress report of the CEMP Special Fund overwinter penguin tracking project

We provide a 2^nd update on the progress of our project “Tracking the overwinter habitat use of krill-dependent predators from Subarea 48.1”. The project was initiated with support from the CEMP Special Fund in 2015/16. Of 150 tags purchased in 2016, all have been deployed and the data collection phase has recently concluded. As of 28 May 2018, the last viable tags had ceased transmitting and, as of writing, final data collation is being completed. All valid data from tags that were released in 2017 have been collated and fit to state-space models, allowing estimation of habitat utilization distributions. Tracks for juvenile Adélie penguin deployed in 2018 remain to be analyzed. Preliminary assessments of environmental indices along tracked locations, suggest chinstraps used the warmest locations, while gentoo adults and Adélie juveniles shared similar distributions for SST in 2017. All tracked animals occupied mostly ice-free water during the period of tracking, but several gentoo and juvenile Adélie penguins locations occurred in ice-covered regions. When found in ice-covered regions, sea-ice conditions experienced by gentoo and Adélie penguins were similar. A script to automate extraction of satellite date for tracking data is provided.