Ports in Aotearoa New Zealand have or are currently undergoing extensive infrastructure developments to accommodate the global trend in larger commercial vessels and cruise ships. With no national standards for underwater noise, Lyttelton Port Company is the first Aotearoa New Zealand port to undertake monitoring to assess pile-driving generated noise effects on local Hector’s dolphins, an endemic and nationally vulnerable spe...

The dolphins Inia geoffrensis—boto and Sotalia fluviatilis—tucuxi are threatened cetaceans inhabiting river ecosystems in South America; population numbers are still lacking for many areas. This paper provides density and abundance estimations of boto and tucuxi in 15 rivers sampled during the past nine years as part of a multinational research alliance. Visual boat-survey data collection protocols and analyses have been devel...

At the breeding grounds of most baleen whales the patchiness and gaps in spatial distribution results from interactions between behavior patterns and environmental conditions. We evaluated the influence of environmental factors (bathymetry and distance from shore with quadratic terms, and wind speed), effort, and spatial autocorrelation effects to predict humpback whale group density in the Southwest Atlantic Ocean. Count data...