Integrating Emerging Technologies into Marine Megafauna Conservation Management

Many recent and emerging technological innovations hold great potential to transform the ‘best-available science’ for marine megafauna conservation management, such as remote sensing, telemetry, molecular technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles, bio-acoustics, and animal-bourne imaging. This includes both the use of these technologies to address key knowledge gaps in species’ biology required for management decisions (e.g., critical habitat use, demographic vital rates, and population connectivity), as well as their application to identify and mitigate human impacts (e.g., distinguishing impact hotspots and forecasting interactions). During early development, the majority of these technologies were out of reach for most wildlife conservation projects due to high costs and levels of necessary expertise, but now most have or will soon advance to platforms that eliminate these barriers. As a consequence, these technologies are being increasingly employed across a broad diversity of wildlife research contexts; however, there has been highly variable efficacy integrating these new tools into conservation science and translating results into successful management practices and policies.
In this Research topic, we aim to address how recent and emerging technological innovations can be used to answer the key outstanding biological questions in marine megafauna and effectively integrated into management practices. We welcome submissions that highlight and synthesize the latest research and applications, and discuss outstanding challenges to effective conservation research implementation (including remaining technological gaps as well as logistical and conceptual hurdles) and barriers to successful translation into management practices and policies. We envision article topics to include, but not limited to, applications in marine megafauna conservation of:

- Remote sensing
- Genomics
- Telemetry, tagging & Biologging
- Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
- Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs)
- Stable isotopes, fatty acid, and other molecular analyses
- Bio-Acoustics
- Animal-bourne imaging (e.g. Crittercam)
- Video monitoring systems
- Sonic imaging