22.03.2013 Views

Final Technical Report: - Southwest Fisheries Science Center - NOAA

Final Technical Report: - Southwest Fisheries Science Center - NOAA

Final Technical Report: - Southwest Fisheries Science Center - NOAA

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

needed to ensure that the SDSS remains the source for the best available information on cetacean<br />

densities.<br />

3) Continuing development of habitat modeling for marine mammals. Although our program has<br />

been able to investigate many previously unexplored aspects of habitat modeling, many areas<br />

have not yet been explored. Entirely new approaches are needed to model the continuously<br />

changing distributions of migratory species, such as blue, fin, and gray whales. Global ocean<br />

circulations models have now reached the state of development where oceanographic conditions<br />

can be forecast several months in advance. Those models could be coupled with cetacean habitat<br />

models to predict cetacean distributions as well. This information could be used to improve the<br />

Navy’s ability to predict where negative interactions with marine mammals are likely to occur<br />

and allow better planning of naval exercises.<br />

96

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!