0000000001319475
AUTHOR
Nathalie Di-méglio
Turtles on the trash track: loggerhead turtles exposed to floating plastic in the Mediterranean Sea
Loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) spend most of their life in large marine areas occupying a variety of habitats where they are exposed to different types of threats. Among these, marine litter is known to pose a risk of entanglement or ingestion. Areas of risk exposure can be identified where the species overlap with litter accumulations, but gathering data on this highly mobile species and marine litter, especially in high sea areas, is challenging. Here we analysed five years of sea turtle and marine litter data collected by a network of research bodies along fixed trans-border transects in the Mediterranean Sea. Ferries were used as observation platforms to gather systematic data on …
Trends in summer presence of fin whales in the Western Mediterranean Sea Region: new insights from a long-term monitoring program
Background The Mediterranean subpopulation of fin whale Balaenoptera physalus (Linnaeus, 1758) has recently been listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List of threatened species. The species is also listed as species in need of strict protection under the Habitat Directive and is one of the indicators for the assessment of Good Environmental Status under the MSFD. Reference values on population abundance and trends are needed in order to set the threshold values and to assess the conservation status of the population. Methods Yearly summer monitoring using ferries as platform of opportunity was performed since 2008 within the framework of the FLT Med Network. Data were collected along sever…
Assessing cetacean surveys throughout the Mediterranean Sea: a gap analysis in environmental space
Heterogeneous data collection in the marine environment has led to large gaps in our knowledge of marine species distributions. To fill these gaps, models calibrated on existing data may be used to predict species distributions in unsampled areas, given that available data are sufficiently representative. Our objective was to evaluate the feasibility of mapping cetacean densities across the entire Mediterranean Sea using models calibrated on available survey data and various environmental covariates. We aggregated 302,481 km of line transect survey effort conducted in the Mediterranean Sea within the past 20 years by many organisations. Survey coverage was highly heterogeneous geographicall…
Data from: Assessing cetacean surveys throughout the Mediterranean Sea: a gap analysis in environmental space
Heterogeneous data collection in the marine environment has led to large gaps in our knowledge of marine species distributions. To fill these gaps, models calibrated on existing data may be used to predict species distributions in unsampled areas, given that available data are sufficiently representative. Our objective was to evaluate the feasibility of mapping cetacean densities across the entire Mediterranean Sea using models calibrated on available survey data and various environmental covariates. We aggregated 302,481 km of line transect survey effort conducted in the Mediterranean Sea within the past 20 years by many organisations. Survey coverage was highly heterogeneous geographicall…