Abstract
Managing the nonlethal effects of disturbance on wildlife populations has been a long‐term goal for decision makers, managers, and ecologists, and assessment of these effects is currently required by European Union and United States legislation. However, robust assessment of these effects is challenging. The management of human activities that have nonlethal effects on wildlife is a specific example of a fundamental ecological problem: how to understand the population‐level consequences of changes in the behavior or physiology of individual animals that are caused by external stressors. In this study, we review recent applications of a conceptual framework for assessing and predicting these consequences for marine mammal populations. We explore the range of models that can be used to formalize the approach and we identify critical research gaps. We also provide a decision tree that can be used to select the most appropriate model structure given the available data. Synthesis and applications: The implementation of this framework has moved the focus of discussion of the management of nonlethal disturbances on marine mammal populations away from a rhetorical debate about defining negligible impact and toward a quantitative understanding of long‐term population‐level effects. Here we demonstrate the framework's general applicability to other marine and terrestrial systems and show how it can support integrated modeling of the proximate and ultimate mechanisms that regulate trait‐mediated, indirect interactions in ecological communities, that is, the nonconsumptive effects of a predator or stressor on a species' behavior, physiology, or life history.
Highlights
The nonlethal effects of disturbance, which we define as a deviation in an animal’s physiology or behavior from patterns occurring in the absence of predators or humans (Frid & Dill, 2002), can strongly affect wildlife populations (Lima, 1998)
Because the responses of animals to many anthropogenic stimuli are similar to their responses to predation risk (Beale & Monaghan, 2004; Frid & Dill, 2002), the evaluation and management of human activities that have nonlethal effects on wildlife can be framed in this wider context
The framework provides a way to quantify four phenomena: (a) the physiological and behavioral changes that occur as the result of exposure to a particular stressor, (b) the acute effects of these physiological and behavioral responses on individual vital rates, and their chronic effects via individual health, defined by New et al (2014) as Thirteen years after the first published formalization of this framework (National Research Council, 2005), we review its applications to marine mammal populations
Summary
The nonlethal effects of disturbance, which we define as a deviation in an animal’s physiology or behavior from patterns occurring in the absence of predators or humans (Frid & Dill, 2002), can strongly affect wildlife populations (Lima, 1998). The framework provides a way to quantify four phenomena: (a) the physiological and behavioral changes that occur as the result of exposure to a particular stressor, (b) the acute effects of these physiological and behavioral responses on individual vital rates, and their chronic effects via individual health, defined by New et al (2014) as Thirteen years after the first published formalization of this framework (National Research Council, 2005), we review its applications to marine mammal populations.
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