Marine Mammal Population Dynamics—Xxx Xxxxxxx Sample Clauses

Marine Mammal Population Dynamics—Xxx Xxxxxxx. Understanding the dynamics of marine mammal populations is essential to management of these species. NOAA is mandated by law to assess annually the status of all populations of marine mammals in U.S. waters, and to formulate regulations based on the results of those assessments. The analysis of marine mammal population dynamics raises challenging problems in fundamental population biology. Researchers in the Mathematical Ecology program at WHOI have made important contributions to population dynamics theory, and have recently begun to apply these models to marine mammals. Individual organisms experience rates of birth, survival, development, growth, and reproduction. On the one hand, these rates reflect the environment of the individual, and all the natural and anthropogenic factors that determine it. On the other, they determine the changes in abundance, distribution, and structure of the population from one year to the next. To study marine mammal population dynamics requires, first, ways to extract estimates of the vital rates from data on individuals. Then those rates must be incorporated into population models that can project the future behavior of the population under a variety of environmental scenarios. These models can be used to compare effects of different management strategies, and to evaluate the effects of model assumptions. Because all population data are imperfect, it is important to assess the sensitivity of the conclusions to uncertainty. We are interested in exploring all these steps. For example, an increasing number of programs in the U.S. and abroad maintain photographic identification databases on individual whales. WHOI researchers have developed methods to extract demographic data from such databases and incorporate it into population models (Xxxxxx and Xxxxxxx, 1993, Xxxxxxx et al., 1998a). These methods have proven to be powerful tools, but there is still no general theory for estimating parameters from catalog sighting data. We are also interested in exploring aspects of the model (e.g., nonlinearity, environmental and demographic stochasticity) that are seldom examined. In collaboration with some NOAA scientists, we have recently developed a method for uncertainty analysis and applied it to incidental mortality of harbor porpoise (Xxxxxxx et al., 1998b), and would like to extend the results. Our specific research interests in marine mammal population dynamics include, but are not limited to, the following: (i) Development of g...