Abstract
This study investigates the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus, Montagu 1821) habitat use in the Portofino marine protected area (NW Italy) and adjacent waters, a core area for the dolphins and a highly touristic area in the Mediterranean Sea. A permanent automated real-time passive acoustic monitoring system, able to detect and track dolphins continuously, was tested in the area within the activities of the Life+ Nature project ARION. The habits of bottlenose dolphins was investigated considering the resident rate inside the area, which quantifies the amount of time dolphins spent in these waters, by means of random forest regression. The dependency of dolphin resident rate was analyzed in relation to four explanatory variables: sea surface temperature, season, time of day, and proximity to the coast. Dolphins spent more time in the area during spring and when sea surface temperature ranged between 15–16°C. Summer resulted the season with lower dolphin residency with significant difference between working day and weekend, in the last the lowest residency was recorded. Main findings provide important information to properly manage the area in order to protect bottlenose dolphins.
Highlights
Marine mammals are often considered indicators of the health of marine ecosystems and key species in ocean conservation planning [1]; this is because they are used politically to promote reserve designation [2]
The differences among resident rates were tested by means of a Several studies worldwide have considered species occurrence in order to determine the habitat use of a cetacean in a specified study area (e.g. [11, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35])
Since time and space are fundamental aspects in animal ecology [36], in this work, for the first time, the habits of bottlenose dolphin were studied through the analysis of their residency in the area
Summary
Marine mammals are often considered indicators of the health of marine ecosystems and key species in ocean conservation planning [1]; this is because they are used politically to promote reserve designation [2]. Bottlenose dolphin residence rate in the marine protected area of Portofino materials. The beneficiaries of the project are: 1. Direzione Marittima di Genova (associated beneficiary); 3. Portofino Marine Protected Area (associated beneficiary); 4. The authors Christian Melchiorre (ChM) and Gianni Viano (GV) are employed by the commercial IT company named Softeco Sismat S.r.l. that provided support in the form of salaries for these authors [ChM, GV], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section
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