Consequences of global shipping traffic for marine giants

By Vanessa Pirotta, Alana Grech, Ian D. Jonsen, W. Laurance, Rob Harcourt. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2018

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Shipping routes in the ocean are analogous to terrestrial roads, in that they are regularly used thoroughfares that concentrate the movement of vessels between multiple locations. We applied a terrestrial road ecology framework to examine the ecological impacts of increased global shipping on "marine giants" (ie great whales, basking sharks [Cetorhinus maximus], and whale sharks [Rhincodon typus]). This framework aided in identifying where such "marine roads" and marine giants are likely to interact and the consequences of those interactions. We also reviewed known impacts of shipping routes on these species, and then applied the road ecology framework to detect unknown and potentially threatening processes. In the marine environment, such a framework can be used to incorporate knowledge of existing shipping impacts into management practices, thereby reducing the detrimental effects of future expansion of shipping routes on marine giants.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68fe68819cb1bff985189a1372a8078768444073

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In Ecology

In Global and Planetary Change

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

Citations in the corpus

Marine mammal conservation: over the horizon (2021, background): “For example, in Australia, data collected by non-specialist volunteers has contributed to understanding local habitat use by migrating humpback whales (Bruce et al. 2014) and enabled scientists to monitor their rate of recovery (Pirotta et al. 2019).”