Catarina Toscano Fonseca

PhD student

Ciência ID: E717-88B3-BF68

In this project, a long-term dataset collected by the Azores Fisheries Observer Programme (POPA) will be analysed to assess its potential to monitor the cetacean species occurring in the Azores and quantify the risk of on-going pressures, focusing on the combined impacts of marine traffic and climate change. More specifically, this project aims to: 1) develop a methodology to analyse the long-term opportunistic data collected by fisheries observers to generate robust estimates of distribution and abundance of the cetacean species occurring in the Azores, 2) derive trends in cetacean spatio-temporal distribution and abundance and identify their environmental drivers and 3) predict how these may change under climate change and evaluate the resulting risk of ship collisions. Finally, this project will develop tools to leverage and enhance the capacity of an existing fishery monitoring program to address wider conservation and management objectives.

Supervisor: Mónica A. <a href="/index.php/people/team/1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Silva</a>