Impacts of Climate Change and Human Activities on Marine Mammals Using Integrated Monitoring Methods

Both climate change and human activities significantly impact the oceans by causing global warming, sea level rise, acidification, pollution, altered circulation, loss of biodiversity, changes in fisheries, increased extreme events, shifts in primary production, and challenges for coastal communities and conservation efforts. These changes, in turn, adversely affect habitats, food sources, health, and overall survival of marine mammals. The recent development of marine mammal monitoring technologies, including visual surveys, acoustic monitoring, satellite tracking and telemetry, genetic sampling, pollutant accumulation analyses, stranding networks, and citizen science, provide substantial opportunities to systematically study the impacts of climate change and human activities on marine mammals.



Integrated monitoring offers a robust approach or/and novel perspective for understanding these impacts, producing consistent or conflicting results in complex scenarios. For example, global scale research has demonstrated that humpback whales exhibit an increasing acoustic presence in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. This poleward movement has also been confirmed by analyzing satellite images of humpback whales at the ocean surface. As another example, the trend of marine mammals increasingly preying on smaller fish has been observed in some toothed whales according to stomach content sampling of stranded animals, likely due to overfishing However, this is not true for some toothed whales when using environmental DNA and citizen science methods.



The utilization of integrated monitoring methods has significant advantages in terms of comprehensive data collection, improved accuracy, and robust decision-making. However, these methods also present challenges related to complexity, cost, data overload and inconsistency. Balancing these pros and cons is essential for successful implementation of integrated monitoring to assess the impacts of climate change and human activities on marine mammals.



This Research Topic in Frontiers in Marine Science seeks research papers related to recent progress and fundamental challenges in understanding the effects of climate change and human activities on marine mammals using integrated monitoring methods.



The Research Topic will cover a wide array of topics, including but not limited to:



- Baseline information of marine mammals, especially critical endangered species, using different monitoring methods.



- Assessment of temporal and cumulative effects of climate change and human activities on marine mammal habitats.



- Novel methods in marine mammal monitoring.



- Modeling behavior, life-history traits, and survival tradeoffs in marine mammals across different scales of climate change and human activities.



- Evaluating the advantages and limitations of integrated monitoring methods and proposing suggestions for future research.



- Identifying drivers and hotspots for the conservation of marine mammals facing climate change and human activities.