Movement, health and survival of north Atlantic right whales

These models are concerned with movement patterns of the highly endangered north Atlantic right whales along the east coast of North America. This is of great interest as these whales are threatened by fisheries and heavy ship traffic in the area. We also incorporate visual health parameters of the individuals into the models which allows us to monitor the state of individual whales.

Rob and I are currently working on making the R code for the hierarchical Bayes models (see Schick et al. 2013 PlosOne) user friendly. We also received new data from the New England Aquarium and are now including resighting data and observed visual health parameters of the 660 individuals that have been identified since 1970 in our models.