When an opportunity arose to support an international team of women to ski the last degree to the North Pole, how could we resist? Here at SMRU Consulting we are delighted to support the Women's Euro-Arabian North Pole Expedition 2018. Led by Felicity Aston MBE a group of 11 women from 10 nations (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, [...]
Yukusam is the male sperm whale named after an island to the northeast of Vancouver Island where he was first sighted in February. Now he has moved south and was spotted in the San Juan Islands on March 31st, the first ever sighting of this animal in Washington Inland waters! Generally a deep ocean species, the [...]
By Chloe Malinka We’d like to let you know about a new publication, authored by researchers from SMRU Consulting, the Sea Mammal Research Unit, and a couple of PAMGuard programmers. Our paper presents findings from the first in-situ passive acoustic monitoring array for marine mammals at an operational tidal turbine in Ramsey Sound, Wales, UK. This post [...]
Last year, we announced the release of our report exploring the viability of Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) for long term monitoring, we are now pleased to announce that the PAM power analysis simulation tool we developed as part of this work has now been made available online! […]
Policy makers and managers are increasingly concerned about the effects of disturbance on wildlife populations, and in situations where management or conservation decisions need to be made, expert elicitation (asking experts for their judgements in a careful, structured process) is a viable way to provide short-term filling of knowledge gaps (we always recommend this to guide research [...]
Over the last two years, there’s been a very interesting exploration of how successfully harbour porpoises forage and what the implications are for their vulnerability or ability to tolerate disturbance. Here we’re going to take a bit of a ‘deep dive’ to explore what it all means. […]
We’re excited to see two new papers published in Aquatic Mammals journal, furthering our knowledge of porpoise health, energetics and the effects of exposure to pile-driving noise. […]
Given our projects in the North Sea and our work on Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and with the development of the iPCoD framework, we’re always particularly interested when new research comes to light on how porpoises respond to noise. Today is one such day of interest! […]
Its been a busy year for the SMRU Consulting North America team. But, we are ending the year on a high with the publication of two recent reports and the preliminary results of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s vessel Slowdown trial. The preliminary results of the Slowdown trial and our reports on the effects of noise [...]
As we close out another really good year for the company, working with great clients, funders and collaborators, it seemed like a good time for the team to look inside and reflect on how we can work together even better and more efficiently! […]
Collaborative research conducted by the SMRU Asia Pacific team was recently published as the Editors Choice in the ICES Journal of Marine Science (IJMS). The research described how the noises made by chorusing fish can help identify the foraging habitat of the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin (Sousa chinensis) in the Pearl River Estuary, southern China. […]
In 2015 Andrew Wright from Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University, VA, wrote; “Establishing noise exposure criteria for marine mammals has proven to be a difficult and contentious issue”. […]
A really interesting study from our colleagues at the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU), the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, and TNO has explored how effective the sonar mitigation known as ‘ramp-up’ is for humpback whales. […]
An important predator in Scottish coastal waters, the east coast bottlenose dolphin has been studied for almost 30 years. In that time the marine landscape has changed dramatically with marine industrial activities and the construction and operation of offshore windfarms. […]
Having a British base for SMRU Consulting Europe means some of us are a bit preoccupied with the weather. And sometimes it even affects our jobs. Visually detecting animals in low visibility conditions can be challenging – and that affects our ability to monitor populations and mitigate impacts. So how do we improve detection performance in [...]
New publication now available: Tollit, D.J., L. Fritz, R. Joy, K. Miller, A. Schulze, J. Thomason, W. Walker, T. Zeppelin, T.S. Gelatt (2017). Diet of endangered Steller sea lions in the Aleutian Islands: New insights from DNA detections and bio-energetic reconstructions. Canadian Journal of Zoology 95(11): 853–868, year 2017, doi: 10.1139/cjz-2016-0253. The western stock of Steller [...]
In just under 60 years the Vaquita has gone from newly discovered species to the brink of extinction. This Gulf of California porpoise is rare, tiny and elusive and the most critically endangered marine mammal in the world. VaquitaCPR is a plan to save the species. […]
This week sees members of our Europe, Asia Pacific and North America teams attending the 22nd Biennial Conference of the Biology of Marine Mammals (the SMM for short). […]
The East Coast Marine Mammal Acoustics Study (ECOMMAS) is a long-term project where acoustic data has been collected on dolphins and porpoise round the east coast of Scotland. Marine Scotland have just released the CPOD data collected between 2013 and 2016. […]
We are thrilled to announce the release of the new interim PCoD code (v3.0) on the Marine Scotland website. […]
