Themes

1. Climatological Setting
   • Spatial gradients in community composition
   • Seasonal changes in species distributions
2. Anomalous Conditions
   • Interannual shifts in distributions / communities
   • Long-term changes in distributions / communities
3. Resource Management
   • Distributions / habitats of protected species
   • Hotspots of productivity / aggregation / migration
   • Stock structure of protected species
4. Anthropogenic Impacts
   • Overlap with oil / gas exploration, shipping lanes
   • Hotspots of species bycatch: spatial / temporal

Questions

• How do shipping lanes and maritime transportation affect the distribution and migratory patterns of marine organisms?
• Do far-ranging marine predators travel across ocean basins following the same persistent routes year after year?
• Are these animal movement corridors defined by ephemeral properties, such as the water temperature?

Pilot Projects

SWOT

providing a facility for sea turtle researchers around the world to report goereferenced data on nesting sites, and tagging projects.

Assessing Susceptibility of Seabirds to Fisheries Bycatch Using Satellite Telemetry

The advent of satellite telemetry has improved our ability to assess the susceptibility of protected pelagic organisms to anthropogenic threats, such as fisheries bycatch. The objective of this pilot project was to determine whether threatened albatross movements overlap spatially and temporally with the Japanese Eastern Pacific Ocean fishery, and to what extent are the birds and the fishery targeting the same oceanographic habitats. Tools that can integrate many disparate point (fishing effort), track (telemetry), and raster (sea surface temperature) data are required to complete these spatial analyses (contributor: David Hyrenbach)

Hyrenbach, K.D., and Dotson, R.C. 2003. Assessing the susceptibility of female Black-footed Albatross (Phoebastria nigripes) to longline fisheries during their post-breeding dispersal: an integrated approach. Biological Conservation, 112: 391-404.

Effect of Longline Fisheries Bycatch on Marine Mammals, Seabirds and Sea Turtles

Fisheries effort from around the world is being compiled and analyzed at Duke University Marine Lab. From this information we may begin deducing its effects on endangered marine mammals, seabirds and sea turtles. For the sake of fisheries management, do intensively fished areas correspond with breeding grounds or home ranges of endangered animals? (contributor: Sloan Freeman)

Lewison RL, Freeman SA, Crowder LB (2004) Quantifying the effects of fisheries on threatened species: the impact of pelagic longlines on loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles. ECOLOGY LETTERS 7 (3): 221-231

Marine Animal Survey Sightings Correlated to Resampled Satellite Sea Surface Temperature

Most large marine animal presence data is collected via cruise surveys. However, environmental information that may correlate to species presence is often collected at different scales of time and space. For this reason, tools that resample environmental data such as satellite-derived sea surface temperature are very useful. (contributors: Pat Halpin, Rob Schick)