Marine mammals face a large array of stressors, including loss of habitat, chemical and noise pollution, and bycatch in fishing, which alone kills hundreds of thousands of marine mammals per year globally. To discern the factors contributing to population trends, scientists must consider the full complement of threats faced by marine mammals. Once populations or ecosystems are found to be at risk of adverse impacts, it is critical to decide which combination of stressors to reduce to bring the population or ecosystem into a more favorable state. Assessing all stressors facing a marine mammal population also provides the environmental context for evaluating whether an additional activity could threaten it. Approaches to Understanding the Cumulative Effects of Stressors on Marine Mammals builds upon previous reports to assess current methodologies used for evaluating cumulative effects and identify new approaches that could improve these assessments. This review focuses on ways to quantify exposure-related changes in the behavior, health, or body condition of individual marine mammals and makes recommendations for future research initiatives.

This volume comprises the proceedings of a symposium on marine mammal survey assessment methods, which took place in Seattle, Washington, USA.

A key goal of fisheries management is to regulate extractive pressure on a resource so as to ensure social, economic and ecological sustainability. This text provides an accessible entry point for students and professionals to management science as developed in fisheries, in order to facilitate uptake of the latest ideas and methods. Traditional management approaches have relied upon a stock assessment based on existing understanding of resource status and dynamics, and a prediction of the likely future response to a static management proposal. However all such predictions include an inherent degree of uncertainty, and the last few decades have seen the emergence of an adaptive approach that uses feedback control to account for unknown future behaviour. Feedback is achieved via a control rule, which defines a relationship between perceived status of the resource and a management action. Evaluations of such rules usually include computer simulation testing across a broad range of uncertainties, so that an appropriate and robust rule can be selected by stakeholders and managers. The book focuses on this approach, which is usually referred to as Management Strategy Evaluation. The book is enriched by case study examples from different parts of the world, as well as insights into the theory and practice from those actively involved in the science of fisheries management.

Since the first volume of The Biology of Sea Turtles was published in 1997, the field has grown and matured in ways few of the authors would have predicted-particularly in the areas of physiology, behavior, genetics, and health. Volume III presents timely coverage of emerging areas as well as the integration of approaches and information that did n