Yan Ropert-Coudert

Antarctica and its surrounding ocean host unique, endemic and cold adapted ecosystems. The Southern Ocean is furthermore, highly productive and provides globally important ecosystem services, from carbon sequestration to substantial genetic resources. The Antarctic region is a natural reserve for iconic marine mammals, penguins and flying seabirds, as well as krill and wider zooplankton communities that underpin pelagic food webs and biogeochemical cycling. Recent environmental changes such as rapid warming, ice loss, permafrost thawing, ocean acidification and arrival of pathogens and pollutants pose risks and uncertainties to Antarctic life as we know it. Furthermore, Antarctica and the Southern Ocean still host the least studied regions, and the largest gaps in biodiversity knowledge. This theme thus aims to strengthen the scientific basis for understanding and protecting Antarctic life across environmental boundaries, from terrestrial and intertidal habitats and ice shelves, surface waters down to the seafloor, and from microbes to top predators. It will integrate novel approaches for rapid biodiversity discovery and functional analyses of the networks of life in the Antarctic region. By integrating observations of terrestrial, sea-ice, pelagic and benthic biota and habitats, standardising protocols, and building cross-national collaborations, Antarctica InSync will enable a more holistic circum-Antarctic view of ecosystem dynamics and resilience in a rapidly changing environment. However, delivering representative circumpolar observations will depend on coordinated governance and operations across national programmes, including logistics, permitting pathways, standardised QA/QC procedures and harmonised data stewardship. This will contribute directly to the objectives of SCAR, SOOS, the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and the IWC, as well as international initiatives such as the UN Ocean Decade, the 30 by 30 target, and the 5th International Polar Year, by improving the representation of biological ecosystems in circumpolar assessments and models and providing essential data to support future conservation and management frameworks.

Antarctica InSync is a global effort to synchronise research across Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, connecting ice, ocean, land, climate, and life to protect this vital region. This roadmap paper introduces the scientific and technological motivation and action plan to build an international programme for a coordinated field season in Antarctica and its surrounding seas. It lays out the international collaboration that is required to realise an ambitious action plan and the opportunities for the science community to address important scientific themes that identify current knowledge gaps. In the spirit of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM), the planned scientific action mandates free data exchange, facilitates international collaboration, and derives expert scientific advice together with the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). Aligned with challenges of the United Nation Ocean and Cryosphere Decades, we plan a shared global effort to better understand the role of Antarctica and its surrounding ocean for our global futures, building on decades of achievements in polar and ocean science. As a milestone leading up to the next International Polar Year in 2032/33 (IPY5), the ambition is to achieve a new level of cooperation, with opportunities for the next generation of polar scientists around the world by enhancing practices in sharing of ideas, infrastructure and information.

Conservation of marine ecosystems can be improved through a better understanding of ecosystem functioning, particularly the cryptic underwater behaviours and interactions of marine predators. Image‐based bio‐logging devices (including images, videos and active acoustic) are increasingly used to monitor wildlife movements, foraging behaviours and their environment, but generate complex datasets needing efficient analytical tools. We review advances in image‐based bio‐logging technology for ecological studies on marine fauna. Emphasis is placed on the diversity of data collected, merging research questions, challenges in image processing, and integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. Image‐based system issues, such as exposure, focus, blurriness, colour balance, moving background, perspective and scale variability are even more challenging in underwater images where conditions change constantly and cannot be controlled. We list computer vision tools and algorithms available for analyses of underwater images, including enhanced tracking algorithms that recognise objects and treat images as a time series. Although AI and computer vision methods offer ample and robust analytical solutions for (semi‐) automated image processing, their uptake by marine ecologists has been slow. Collaboration among ecologists, modellers, statisticians, engineers and computer scientists is needed to integrate ecological questions, data selection and computational methodology. We propose a four‐phase framework for image data processing and analysis (video checking and manipulation, image processing, image labelling and model development) accompanied by detailed python code. We also outline the additional complications in aligning the diverse scalar movement metrics from bio‐loggers along with image‐based data, such as acceleration, depth and location, which typically are collected at different resolutions. Building analytical frameworks for on‐board image data collection (e.g. lightweight models) is also explored. We advocate for a collaborative research community at the Ecology‐AI interface, emphasising sharing and exchange of both data and tools to drive cross‐disciplinary innovation. Beyond the Ecology‐AI interface, we pave the path for the application of insights from image‐based bio‐logging technology enabling collaboration among scientists, conservation managers, and policymakers. Systematic applications of computer vision tools to image‐based bio‐logging technology will enhance the power these data hold, informing about the status of marine ecosystems, testing and developing ecological theory and aiding conservation.

The recent Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) sets ambitious goals but no clear pathway for how zero loss of important biodiversity areas and halting human-induced extinction of threatened species will be achieved. We assembled a multi-taxa tracking dataset (11 million geopositions from 15,845 tracked individuals across 121 species) to provide a global assessment of space use of highly mobile marine megafauna, showing that 63% of the area that they cover is used 80% of the time as important migratory corridors or residence areas. The GBF 30% threshold (Target 3) will be insufficient for marine megafauna’s effective conservation, leaving important areas exposed to major anthropogenic threats. Coupling area protection with mitigation strategies (e.g., fishing regulation, wildlife-traffic separation) will be essential to reach international goals and conserve biodiversity.

Antarctica harbors many distinctive features of life, yet much about the diversity and functioning of Antarctica’s life remains unknown. Evolutionary histories and functional ecology are well understood only for vertebrates, whereas research on invertebrates is largely limited to species descriptions and some studies on environmental tolerances. Knowledge on Antarctic vegetation cover showcases the challenges of characterizing population trends for most groups. Recent community-level microbial studies have provided insights into the functioning of life at its limits. Overall, biotic interactions remain largely unknown across all groups, restricted to basic information on trophic level placement. Insufficient knowledge of many groups limits the understanding of ecological processes on the continent. Remedies for the current situation rely on identifying the caveats of each ecological discipline and finding targeted solutions. Such precise delimitation of knowledge gaps will enable a more aware, representative, and strategic systematic conservation planning of Antarctica.