Habitat model forecasts suggest potential redistribution of marine predators in the southern Indian Ocean

A Subantarctic fur seal at Marion Island, southern Indian Ocean. Photograph: Ryan Reisinger.

Our new paper ‘Habitat model forecasts suggest potential redistribution of marine predators in the southern Indian Ocean‘, has been published in the journal Diversity and Distributions.

The journal also featured our paper on its cover.

An adult male southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina) at Marion Island, southern Indian Ocean. Photograph: Ryan Reisinger.

The was financially supported by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) through a SANCOR fellowship (94916 to Ryan Reisinger) and a SANAP grant (SNA2005060800001 to Pierre Pistorius), by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) through a fellowship to Ryan Reisinger and by WWF-UK. The work was facilitated by the activities of the SCAR Retrospective Analysis of Antarctic Tracking Data project, funded by the synthesis centre CESAB of the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) and by a meeting of the expert group on “Pelagic spatial planning of the sub-Antarctic areas of Planning Domains 4, 5 and 6,” financially supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Amanda Lombard was supported by the NRF’s South African Research Chair Initiative.

Combining regional habitat selection models for large-scale prediction: Circumpolar habitat selection of Southern Ocean humpback whales

Our new paper entitled “Combining Regional Habitat Selection Models for Large-Scale
Prediction: Circumpolar Habitat Selection of Southern Ocean Humpback Whales” is out now in the journal Remote Sensing. The paper is Open Access, freely available on the publisher’s website:

Reisinger RR, Friedlaender AS, Zerbini AN, Palacios DM, Andrews-Goff V, Dalla Rosa L, Double M, Findlay K, Garrigue C, How J, Jenner C, Jenner M-N, Mate B, Rosenbaum HC, Seakamela SM, Constantine R (2021)
Combining Regional Habitat Selection Models for Large-Scale Prediction: Circumpolar Habitat Selection of Southern Ocean Humpback Whales.
Remote Sensing 13(11): 2074
https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13112074

Additionally, the code supporting the paper is available at:
https://github.com/ryanreisinger/megaPrediction

We are grateful to the International Whaling Commission Southern Ocean Research Partnership for funding the work and the International Whaling Commission for providing survey, sighting, and whaling catch data. We thank our colleagues involved in collecting the telemetry data.

‘Islands to remember’ in ‘Go!’ and ‘Weg!’

A few of Chris Oosthuizen’s and my photos from Marion Island are the in the July 2017 issue of Go! magazine / Weg! tydskrif.