Status of the world's baleen whales

By P. Thomas, R. Reeves, R. Brownell. 2016

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

No global synthesis of the status of baleen whales has been published since the 2008 IUCN Red List assessments. Many populations remain at low numbers from historical commercial whaling, which had ceased for all but a few by 1989. Fishing gear entanglement and ship strikes are the most severe current threats. The acute and long-term effects of anthropogenic noise and the cumulative effects of multiple stressors are of concern but poorly understood. The looming consequences of climate change and ocean acidification remain difficult to characterize. North Atlantic and North Pacific right whales are among the species listed as Endangered. Southern right, bowhead, and gray whales have been assessed as Least Concern but some subpopulations of these species - western North Pacific gray whales, Chile-Peru right whales, and Svalbard/Barents Sea and Sea of Okhotsk bowhead whales - remain at low levels and are either Endangered or Critically Endangered. Eastern North Pacific blue whales have reportedly recovered, but Antarctic blue whales remain at about 1% of pre-exploitation levels. Small isolated subspecies or subpopulations, such as northern Indian Ocean blue whales, Arabian Sea humpback whales, and Mediterranean Sea fin whales are threatened while most subpopulations of sei, Bryde’s, and Omura’s whales are inadequately monitored and difficult to assess.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecology, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/526cddc70a35931f6faa15f46426616fccb0553c

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In Atmospheric Science

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Citations in the corpus

Current global risks to marine mammals: Taking stock of the threats (2018, methodology): “These were supplemented by reviews focusing on threats specific to cetaceans (Culik, 2010; Thomas et al., 2015), pinnipeds (Kovacs et al., 2012) and sirenians (Marsh et al., 2011).”
Marine Ecosystem Assessment for the Southern Ocean: Birds and Marine Mammals in a Changing Climate (2020, background): “The status of fin and sei whales are less certain due to lack of abundance estimates (Thomas et al., 2016), although see Tulloch et al.”