Conservation and restoration of degraded insular biodiversity: impacts of the removal of introduced mammals on the dynamics of infectious diseases in seabirds across islands of the Southern Ocean. – REMOVE_DISEASE

The project combines a series of approaches, from field population ecology and movement ecology to molecular epidemiology and socio-anthropology.
It is implemented at a broad scale in three main areas: the French Southern Lands, Marion Island, Soith Africa, and the Falkland Islands.
It will notably benefit from the plan to eradicate introduced mammal species from Amsterdam Island in June 2024, and long term eco-epidemiology monitoring and field experiments conducted by members of the project consortium.

Ongoing.

Will be potentially obtained after the whole island eradication of introduced mammals from Amsterdam Island planned for June 2024.

As of October 17th 2023:

Lamb, J., Tornos, J., Dedet, R., Gantelet, H., Keck, N., Baron, J., Bely, M., Clessin, A., Flechet, A., Gamble, A. & Boulinier, T. 2023. Hanging out at the club: breeding status and territoriality affect individual space use, multi-species overlap, and pathogen exposure at a seabird colony. Functional Ecology 37: 576-590.

Boulinier, T. 2023. Avian influenza spread and seabird movements between colonies. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 38: 391-395.

The project aims at exploring the impact of the removal of introduced species on islands on the dynamics of pathogens and biodiversity. Introduced mammal species on islands, such as rats, mice and cats, are highly responsible for biodiversity loss via the extinction of native populations. This is critical at a time when other factors of global change, such as fishery pressure and climate change for seabirds, also contribute to threaten wild species, leading to high threats to populations worldwide. Ambitious restauration projects based on the removal of introduced species from islands are being implemented, but they rarely consider the potential role of pathogens as a threat to biodiversity, despite their potential importance. In densely breeding species, such as seabirds, the threat posed by introduced pathogens is increasingly recognized, and introduced mammal species are suspected to be playing key roles as maintenance reservoirs or vectors of transmission, such as on Amsterdam Island, where yearly epizooties of avian cholera kill thousands of nestlings. In this project, we thus aim at exploring the effects of the removal of introduced species on islands on the dynamics of exposure of native threatened species to infectious agents. Moreover, we will explore the mechanisms by which those changes may occur and their potential long term implications. By including avian scavengers as sentinel species in epidemiological surveys pre- and post-eradication, we will maximize our ability to detect effects. In parallel, we will investigate how consideration of these epidemiological aspects could benefit the implementation of large scale biodiversity restauration projects. This timely project will benefit from interdisciplinary approaches, independently funded restauration efforts, and from being conducted on islands which have been the subject of detailed monitoring and conservation biology studies by the international partner teams. It will focus on three islands of the Southern Ocean, Amsterdam Island (French Southern and Antarctic Lands), Marion Island (South Africa) and New Island (Falkland Islands), which host large threatened seabird populations of albatrosses, penguins and burrowing petrels suffering from introduced mammal species. Stakeholders will notably be government environmental agencies, such as the National Nature Reserve of the French Southern lands, and non-governmental organisations, such as BirdLife and Falklands Conservation, which are critically involved in biodiversity conservation. The direct involvement of stakeholders in an international setting will contribute to achieving the objectives of the project and its broad implications: the findings could highlight how the removal of introduced species from islands can directly benefit the conservation of biodiversity by relieving native species from predation pressure from those species, but also indirectly via its effect on disease agents.