José Manuel Reyes-González

Spanish National Research Council | CSIC · Institute of Marine Sciences

Aim Over the last decades, the study of movement through tracking data has grown exceeding the expectations of movement ecologists. This has posed new challenges, specifically when using individual tracking data to infer higher‐level distributions (e.g. population and species). Sources of variability such as individual site fidelity (ISF), environm...

Every year, billions of birds undertake extensive migrations between breeding and non-breeding areas, facing challenges that require behavioural adjustments, particularly to flight timing and duration. Such adjustments in daily activity patterns and the influence of extrinsic factors (e.g., environmental conditions, moonlight) have received much mo...

In colonial seabirds, ecological divergence may occur in the absence of physical barriers, driven by the isolation of populations due to distance, or the adaptation to local environment. In migratory seabirds, the geographic segregation among breeding populations can persist year round (i.e., strong migratory connectivity) when populations breeding...

Light‐level geolocators are popular bio‐logging tools, with advantageous sizes, longevity and affordability. Biologists tracking seabirds often presume geolocator spatial accuracies between 186 and 202 km from previously innovative, yet taxonomically, spatially and computationally limited, studies. Using recently developed methods, we investigated...

Migratory marine species cross political borders and enter the high seas, where the lack of an effective global management framework for biodiversity leaves them vulnerable to threats. Here, we combine 10,108 tracks from 5775 individual birds at 87 sites with data on breeding population sizes to estimate the relative year-round importance of nation...

Sexual segregation in foraging strategies has been little studied in marine species with slight sexual size dimorphism (SSD), particularly regarding the role of environmental conditions and fishery activities. Sexual differences in fishery attendance are of particular concern because uneven mortality associated with bycatch may exacerbate impacts i...

Despite its importance for ecology and conservation, we are still far from understanding how environmental variability interacts with intrinsic factors and individual specialization to determine trophic strategies of long-lived taxa, mostly due to difficulties in studying the same animals over extended periods. Here, by yearly consistently sampling...

ABSTRACT: Insights into the year-round movements and behaviour of seabirds are essential to better understand their ecology and to evaluate possible threats at sea. The Atlantic petrel Pterodroma incerta is an Endangered gadfly petrel endemic to the South Atlantic Ocean, with virtually the entire population breeding on Gough Island (Tristan da Cun...

Sexual segregation (SS) is widespread among animal taxa, with males and females segregated in distribution, behavior, or feeding ecology but so far, most studies on birds have focused on the breeding period. Outside this period, the relevance of segregation and the potential drivers of its persistence remain elusive, especially in the marine enviro...

Many generalist species are composed of individuals varying in the size of their realized niches within a population. To understand the underlying causes and implications of this phenomenon, repeated samplings on the same individuals subjected to different environmental conditions are needed. Here, we studied individual specialization of feeding st...

Foraging distributions of colonial central place foragers are shaped not only by environmental factors but also by population parameters: larger colonies will deplete resources around the colony and will therefore have larger foraging areas, but parapatric competition will often cause spatial segregation, leading to little overlap among foraging ar...

This book has been published by the Spanish Society of Ornithology (SEO/BirdLife) in the framework of the MIGRA programme. In this work we analyse the movement ecology and at-sea behaviour of two related seabird species under conservation concern: the Scopoli's and the Cory's Shearwater. It focuses on Spanish populations, covering the entire distri...

Best Poster Award at the MaPSIS International Conference 2017

Conservation policies for the protection of marine biodiversity are being implemented in many international management treaties worldwide. The process of identification of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) is often based on the spatial preference of threatened species, such as many marine predators. Multi-colony tracking studies comprising a wide geogr...

With increasing pressure on the oceans from environmental change, there has been a global call for improved protection of marine ecosystems through the implementation of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Here, we used Species Distribution Modelling (SDM) of tracking data from 14 seabird species to identify key marine areas in the southwest Atlantic Oc...

Fisheries provide an abundant and predictable food source for many pelagic seabirds through discards, but also pose a major threat to them through bycatch, threatening their populations worldwide. The reform of the European Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), which intends to ban discards through the landing obligation of all catches, may force seabirds...

It is well known that colonial breeders are spatially constrained by their need to return to the colony to attend their rearing duties. This behaviour results in a decreasing density of foraging birds with the distance to the colony. In addition, the effect of intraspecific competition, which grows with colony size, also increases the length of for...

Research on sexual segregation is essential to understand the role of sexual differences on distribution, migration and reproduction over the annual cycle of migratory species. Sexual differences in seabird ecology have been often reported during the breeding period, yet little is known about sex effects out of that period. We evaluated the degree...

Foraging strategies of colonial central-place foragers, such as breading seabirds, are spatially constrained by their need to return to the colony to attend to their rearing duties and by a denso-dependent competition for resources that increases with colony size. Moreover, in areas where the foraging ranges of several breeding colonies potentially...

Fisheries and seabirds are intimately associated as both exploit the same productive areas. Some seabirds take advantage of fishery discards, mostly generated by trawlers, as a supplementary foraging resource, changing their foraging strategies linked to this predictable food. Thus it is expected that any change in fishing practices will have impor...

Long-distance migrants are suffering drastic declines in the last decades. Causes beneath this problem are complex due to the wide spatial and temporal scale involved. We aim to reveal migratory routes, stopover areas, wintering grounds, and migratory strategies for the most southwestern populations of the near-threatened European Roller Coracias g...

Aim Apical pelagic species forage in predictable habitats, and their movements should signal biologically and ecologically significant areas of the marine ecosystem. Several countries are now engaged in identifying these areas based on animal tracking, but this is often limited to a few individuals from one breeding population, which may result in...