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.

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