Final Technical Report: - Southwest Fisheries Science Center - NOAA

overcome some of these limitations. For example, tagging data could be useful in exploring
seasonal distribution patterns and developing migration models for large whales. Shore-based
surveys and coastal aerial line-transect surveys could be used to develop predictive density
models for nearshore marine mammal species, such as harbor porpoise, coastal bottlenose
dolphins, gray whales, and pinnipeds.
A final important line of research relates to the scale and extent of cetacean density
predictions. The studies completed as part of this project have demonstrated that accurate
models are best constructed using input data from the same geographic region, i.e., the CCE or
ETP, rather than combined across ecoregions. Therefore, the extrapolation of our models to
other areas in different marine ecosystems (e.g. Hawaii) is not reliably possible at this time.
However, the seasonal comparison suggests that temporal and/or spatial expansion of models
may be possible in the future if we can obtain sufficient input data spanning a broader range of
habitat conditions. Thus, the continued collection of integrated marine mammal and ecosystem
data throughout a range of marine habitats will be necessary to expand the scope and utility of
SDSS in the future.
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