Key research questions of global importance for cetacean conservation

Abstract

Limited resources and increasing environmental concerns have prompted calls to identify the critical questions that most need to be answered to advance conservation, thereby providing an agenda for scientific research priorities. Cetaceans are often keystone indicator species but also high profile, charismatic flagship taxa that capture public and media attention as well as political interest. A dedicated workshop was held at the conference of the Society for Marine Mammalogy (December 2013, New Zealand) to identify where lack of data was hindering cetacean conservation and which questions need to be addressed most urgently. This paper summarizes 15 themes and component questions prioritized during the workshop. We hope this list will encourage cetacean conservation-orientated research and help agencies and policy makers to prioritize funding and future activities. This will ultimately remove some of the current obstacles to science-based cetacean conservation.

Impacts of Navy Sonar on Whales and Dolphins: Now beyond a Smoking Gun?

“…The degree to which this happens is currently an important question for cetacean conservation, in all species (e.g., Parsons et al, 2015). For example, even minor reductions in feeding behavior as the result of human disturbance were estimated to have dramatic effects on the energy budget of cetaceans, which could translate into substantive negative impacts on cetacean fitness and health (Christiansen et al, 2013).…”

“…It can take a decade or more to detect a decline in the best studied dolphin populations (Wilson et al, 1999;Thompson et al, 2000). Scientific uncertainty is a major problem for assessing cetacean conservation status (Parsons et al, 2015). However, lack of data and effort for beaked whales, coupled with difficulties in studying them, makes discerning their conservation status particularly difficult (Parsons, 2016).…”

“…Even where declines in marine mammal populations have been identified, the ultimate cause of declines can sometimes be difficult to determine due to a wide range of subtle contributing factors (Merrick et al, 1987;Alverson, 1992;Marmontel et al, 1996). The difficulty with monitoring the effects of anthropogenic impacts on cetaceans and the huge level of uncertainty involved have been noted as key issues that need to be addressed via scientific research, in order to better conserve, manage and protect cetaceans (Agardy et al, 2007;Dolman, 2007;Dolman and Jasny, 2015;Parsons et al, 2015;Parsons, 2016).…”

Abundance estimate of the Amazon River dolphin (Inia geoffrensis) and the tucuxi (Sotalia fluviatilis) in southern Ucayali, Peru

“…The total population sizes of both species are currently unknown. As riverine species, these dolphins are greatly affected by human disturbance (Turvey et al, 2007;Kelkar et al, 2010), yet both are still listed as Data Deficient by the IUCN (Reeves et al, 2011;Secchi, 2012) highlighting one of the key research gaps in cetacean conservation (Parsons et al, 2015). Line and strip transects and mark-recapture techniques have been used to estimate population sizes for both species in certain areas of their distribution but methods have not been standardized, making total estimates unreliable and hard to compare (Gonzalez, 1994;Martin & da Silva, 2004b;Aliaga-Rossel et al, 2006;Gómez-Salazar et al, 2012a, 2012bMcguire & AliagaRossel, 2014) The most extensive survey to date covered the main rivers in six countries resulting in significant insights into habitat preferences for both species (Gómez-Salazar et al, 2012).…”

Obstacles and Opportunities of Using a Mobile App for Marine Mammal Research

“…One approach to combat the scarcity of such data is to embrace citizen science, a non-standardized alternative method of data collection [8]. Citizen science projects are often focused on collecting multi-year and regional-scale data [9,10] primarily to estimate species distributions [9,[11][12][13].…”