The distribution of emperor penguins is circumpolar, with 54 colony locations currently reported of which 50 are currently extant as of 2019. Here we report on eight newly discovered colonies and confirm the rediscovery of three breeding sites, only previously reported in the era before Very High Resolution satellite imagery was available, making a total of 61 breeding locations. This represents an increase of ~20% in the number of breeding sites, but, as most of the colonies appear to be small, they may only increase the total population by around 5–10%. The discoveries have been facilitated by the use of Sentinel2 satellite imagery, which has a higher resolution and more efficient search mechanism than the Landsat data previously used to search for colonies. The small size of these new colonies indicates that considerations of reproductive output in relation to metabolic rate during huddling is likely to be of interest. Some of the colonies exist in offshore habitats, something not previously reported for emperor penguins. Comparison with recent modelling results show that the geographic locations of all the newly found colonies are in areas likely to be highly vulnerable under business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, suggesting that population decreases for the species will be greater than previously thought.

中文翻译：

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Sentinel2 发现的新殖民地揭示了帝企鹅的好消息和坏消息

帝企鹅的分布是环极的，目前报告了 54 个殖民地位置，其中 50 个目前存在于 2019 年。在这里，我们报告了 8 个新发现的殖民地，并确认了三个繁殖地点的重新发现，之前仅在非常高之前的时代报告过可获得分辨率卫星图像，总共有 61 个繁殖地点。这意味着繁殖地点的数量增加了约 20%，但是，由于大多数殖民地看起来很小，它们可能只会将总人口增加约 5-10%。使用 Sentinel2 卫星图像促进了这些发现，该图像比以前用于搜索殖民地的 Landsat 数据具有更高的分辨率和更有效的搜索机制。这些新菌落的小尺寸表明，在挤在一起时考虑与代谢率相关的生殖输出可能会引起人们的兴趣。一些殖民地存在于近海栖息地，以前没有报道过帝企鹅的情况。与最近的建模结果进行比较表明，在照常营业的温室气体排放情景下，所有新发现的殖民地的地理位置可能处于高度脆弱的区域，这表明该物种的人口减少将比以前想象的要大。