Dear MARMAM community, My co-authors and I are pleased to share our new publication: "Challenges of Monitoring Endangered Bryde's Whales During a Period of Rapid Environmental Change" recently published in Animal Conservation. Here is a small snippet of what our research investigated: Estimating population size is challenging for rare and elusive species that occur at low densities and are difficult to detect during sampling. We estimated the abundance of a Nationally critical whale species—Aotearoa New Zealand Bryde’s whales—using a custom-formulated POPAN model which incorporated transience to account for their complex residency patterns. Abundance did not increase as anticipated, with multiple marine heatwaves occurring over the same period, we saw a climate-induced shift in Bryde’s distribution likely beyond sampling effort, highlighting the necessity of accounting for drivers of change when estimating abundance of endangered species. [cid:10a7eb85-5088-4387-b3e1-04f02aaa6a4d] Please find the open access publication at: https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acv.70032 Full reference: Cranswick, A. S., Fewster, R. M., Brough, T., Dwyer, S. L., Lea, C., Tranmer, S., Zaeschmar, J. R., & Constantine, R. (2025). Challenges of Monitoring Endangered Bryde's Whales During a Period of Rapid Environmental Change. Animal Conservation, 0: 1–11. doi.org/10.1111/acv.70032 Best wishes, Annabelle Cranswick
