Fisheries bycatch mitigation measures as an efficient tool for the conservation of seabird populations

The impact of industrial fisheries on marine biodiversity is conspicuous in large pelagic vertebrate fisheries bycatch. In seabirds, this led to the decline of many populations since the 1980s following the rise of global fishing efforts. Bycatch mitigation measures were implemented in the 2000s, but their effects on the concerned seabird populations remain poorly quantified and understood.
We studied the effects of bycatch mitigation measures on the demography of the white-chinned petrel, one of the most bycatch impacted seabirds whose populations suffered dramatic declines before the implementation of mitigation measures. To do so we 1) built multi-event capture-recapture models to estimate the demographic parameters of a population from Possession Island (southern Indian Ocean) over thirty years, 2) assessed the effect of climate and fishery covariates on demographic parameters, 3) built a population matrix model to estimate stochastic growth rate according to the management in fishe...