LEN THOMAS

Following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, we worked within the team estimating the effect on marine mammal populations. This research formed part of the Natural Resources Damage Assessment used as a basis for the settlement between BP the US Government. We have continued to gather information and are now updating our assessments... Experiments designed to answer this question are difficult and expensive. We have been working with the scientists involved to develop methods that make better use of existing data (see MOCHA web site). This paper gives an overview of our work... The vaquita is a small porpoise, found only in the Gulf of California, Mexico. The species is on the brink of extinction because of accidental deaths in illegal fishing nets. Monitoring vaquita population size is hard because so few remain. We have worked as part of an international expert panel, in collaboration with many others, to design visual and acoustic surveys, and analyze the resulting data.

Primary location: St Andrews United Kingdom