Monitoring and mitigating marine megafaunal declines in the Anthropocene

Human influences now pervade all ocean ecosystems and are (probably) driving rapid and widespread declines in marine biodiversity. But collecting data in the oceans is often challenging. Detecting and robustly quantifying species declines can often be difficult, particularly when dealing with long-lived, wide-ranging taxa. And correctly identifying the mechanism(s) underpinning those declines can be even more complex. Nevertheless, biodiversity conservation requires us to make management decisions, usually before we really have perfect understanding (and often agreement). In this talk, I’ll focus on the work that I’ve been doing with my research group and collaborators to understand the drivers of change in some marine vertebrate populations, assess the efficacy of potential management interventions, and develop tools that can (hopefully) help decision making in the face of uncertainty.