Habitat Modeling and Preferences of Marine Mammals as Function of Oceanographic Characteristics: Development of Predictive Tools for Assessing the Risks and the Impacts Due to Sound Emissions.

摘要

The long-term goals of this research are: - Improving the knowledge about marine mammal ecology and about how ocean dynamics affect their distribution and behavior in different areas; - Developing the tools enabling to predict marine mammal presence probability or density on the basis of the data available to detect their presence (i.e. visual observations or acoustic detections) and the available environmental predictors; - Creating the knowledge-based background about potential mitigation measures appropriate for different areas; - Creating a Decision Support System of Rules that will constitute a guideline for choosing the appropriate combination of the tools at managers disposal which is likely to be the best way to maximize effective mitigation efforts. These are the main scientific objectives of this research: Objective: (1) Development of methods to integrate acoustic and visual data in marine mammal distribution/density models; Objective; (2) Evaluation of the model transferability to areas different from the zone of calibration; Objective; (3) Definition of a knowledge-based decision support framework for managing the impact of the noise-producing human activities.