My co-authors and I would like to report two linked publications about marine mammal bycatch and conservation assessment. The first relates to a new US trade rule requiring countries to assess and mitigate marine mammal bycatch as a condition of exporting seafood products to US markets. The original paper is available here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6318/1372.summary Non-subscribers can find a free PDF of the paper on our nonprofit's publications page: http://oceansinitiative.org/publications/

Next, a few of us published an Animal Counting Toolkit to help countries build capacity for marine mammal surveys: http://www.int-res.com/abstracts/esr/v34/p149-165/ The paper outlines practical methods for generating rough abundance estimates using small-boat line transect surveys, which can help fill in knowledge gaps on cetacean abundance and distribution in coastal waters, and also serve as a low-cost platform for training observers to work on more expensive ship-board or aerial surveys covering a country's EEZ. This paper's supporting information file contains material to help novice users define a survey region using free GIS tools, design a systematic survey in Distance, collect data using CyberTracker, and analyze data in Distance.