MULTI-STRESS: Quantifying the impacts of multiple stressors in multiple dimensions to improve ecological forecasting

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Our world is characterised by change, driven largely by human activities. These activities - such as the harvesting of natural resources and emission of greenhouse gases - put pressure on our planet's ecosystems, reshaping global biodiversity through declines in the abundance of populations, and the extinction of species. However, we still have limited understanding of the mechanisms by which these detrimental activities (termed "stressors") affect wildlife populations. This lack of understanding is further exacerbated by the fact that most species globally (~80%) are exposed to more than one stressor (e.g. fishing pressure and climate change) simultaneously. In such a scenario, stressors may interact in unpredictable ways, further accelerating biodiversity declines. Consequently, without a better understanding of how stressors interact to impact wildlife populations it is impossible to accurately forecast how biodiversity will change into the future, or identify species at the highest risk of extinction. This project will tackle this gap in our knowledge in a fundamentally different way to what has been attempted before. Rather than solely examining the impacts of multiple stressors on population abundances, we will use an exceptional dataset of two Vulnerable Red Listed seabird species as a model system to quantify how two prominent stressors (climate change and fishery pressure) impact multiple facets of a population's ecology simultaneously. We will explore how stressors impact behaviours (individual foraging effort), physical condition (body condition, a measure of an individual's overall health), demographic rates (e.g., survival, fecundity), and population trends over time within a single analytical framework. Doing so will allow us to understand how wildlife populations change to cope with increasing levels of anthropogenically derived stress, whether such changes mitigate the negative impacts of multiple stressors, and whether these changes can be used to predict populations that are at risk of collapse. We will then use this information to build models to forecast how these vulnerable species will cope with future environmental change by explicitly incorporating individual's ability to change behaviour, morphology, and demographic rates in the face of increasing stress. The outcomes of this project have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of how multiple stressors impact multiple facets of a population's ecology, and how these impacts can sum to drive biodiversity change. The knowledge generated by this project will help conservationists to develop more effective strategies to manage at-risk species, policy makers to more reliably judge the impacts of resource extraction, and the general public to gain a deeper appreciation of the challenges faced by wildlife due to human activities. It will also provide a platform on which the wider research community can build to advance our understanding of the impacts of multiple stressors on biodiversity.