Fitting Models of the Population Consequences of Acoustic Disturbance to Data from Marine Mammal Populations. Annual Report

摘要

Our scientific objectives are to build a statistical framework for understanding the at-sea health of (initially) three species of marine mammals: southern and northern elephant seals, and northern right whales. For elephant seals our goal is to build a hierarchical Bayesian model that provides daily estimates of lipid status, as lipid status of the mother is directly linked to pup survival. This model will use the drift dive behavior of elephant seals (Crocker et al. 1997) as the link to the underlying true, yet unmeasurable, lipid state. We are just starting to analyze the right whale data, but our initial scientific objective is to build a demographic model that provides spatially and temporally explicit estimates of individual survival and calving.