For the first time our geographers have used freely available satellite radar images to track emperor penguins through the polar winter – giving a year-round view of their movements.
Monitoring the endangered birds through the Antarctic’s dark months is important because this is a key stage in their breeding cycle.
Emperor penguins rely on stable sea ice attached to the coastline for roughly nine months to breed and raise chicks.
They are threatened by climate change, and their population is predicted to decline rapidly this century due to the decreasing Antarctic sea ice.
Knowing the penguins' movements during the polar winter could help support future conservation efforts.
The radar imagery also picked up trails of the penguins’ guano (their poo) during late summer.
This was confirmed by additional optical imagery, helping scientists to further piece together the birds’ movements.
Emperor penguins live in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth so they can be difficult to monitor, especially during the polar winter when it’s dark for 24 hours a day. We’ve shown that satellite radar imaging is a very useful tool for understanding their behaviour during a key part of the breeding cycle and particularly their response to environmental change during winter.
The researchers used the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Copernicus Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mission to track the movements of emperor penguin colonies during winter between 2017 and 2024.
The birds, which have an average height of about four feet, stood out on radar against the flatter winter sea ice.
This meant the research team could track their movements throughout the year, even when it was dark.
The team combined the satellite radar imagery with medium resolution summer optical imagery to track the movement of colonies at Atka Bay, Coulman Island, and Cape Washington in Antarctica.
Optical images came from ESA's Sentinel-2 and NASA's Landsat 8 satellites.
Read the research paper in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
The research was led by Dr Grant Macdonald, a post-doctoral research associate in our Department of Geography.
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The research included the British Antarctic Survey, the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA.
The researchers acknowledged the European Space Agency and NASA for making the imagery, and Google Earth Engine for hosting.
Banner image: Emperor penguins at Snow Hill Island, Antarctica. Credit Dr Peter Fretwell, British Antarctic Survey.
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