Peel D, Lloyd-Jones L, Evans K (2024). Informing southern right whale management through continued monitoring, determination of aggregation areas and development of approaches to increase data flow efficiencies and utility: Subcomponent 3 Expanding utilisation of southern right whale datasets for estimation of national population parameters. Report to the National Environmental Science Program. CSIRO.
Overview
This project was focused around two activities:
- An evaluation of the suitability of sightings data currently held in the Australasian Right Whale Photo Identification Catalogue (ARWPIC) for use in population modelling and
- Undertake a simulation exercise to identify what degree of sampling across the south-eastern subpopulation would be required for identifying population change and the monitoring framework required to obtain such a dataset
Given the very low numbers of sightings in the ARWPIC dataset, and in particular, cows with calves (from which population parameters are determined), and unknown spatial and temporal effort, directly using the data for the purposes of the project was determined as difficult due to potential capture probability heterogeneity that cannot be resolved.
The simulation exercise suggests that data collection should have a primary focus on aggregation/nursery areas and include building datasets that allow for population discrimination (e.g. genomic datasets) to ensure that population parameters are not biased by transitory animals (from the south-western subpopulation) occurring across the region. In addition, some effort should be placed into regions outside of aggregation/nursery areas to ensure that any spatial expansion of populations and the emergence of new aggregation/nursery areas is captured.
