Predicting foraging dive outcomes in chinstrap penguins using biologging and animal-borne cameras

During the breeding season 2018-19, 22 chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarcticus) from Signey in the South Orkney Islands were equipped with a GPS tracker (Pathtrack nanoFix® GEO) set to record one location every minute, a time-depth recorder (TDR, Lotek LAT 1800 series) recording one pressure measure every 2 seconds and a video camera (Little Leonardo DVL400M) to record approximatively 5 hours of footage starting at a preset time. The data from the TDR was processed using the R diveMove package to detect each dive and calculate some dive metrics. The dives were linked to the GPS data in order to add the water depth at the location of the dive. The camera footage was viewed by two independent researchers who classified the outcome of each dive as: no krill encounter, single krill encounter or krill swarm encounter. The number of prey items caught during each dive was also estimated. Two random forest models were used to predict the outcome and the number of prey cauht for each dive from an arrey of environmental variables. These were derived from the dive metrics, the surface tracking or the environment. The dataset presents the response and the predicting variables for 770 dives.