Baleen whales were heavily exploited during commercial whaling in the 20th century. Extensive biological data was collected during this exploitation. My work uses contemporary quantitative methods to analyze this historical data to answer long-standing questions about baleen whale populations.
The Washington portion of the Salish Sea contains both Southern resident killer whales as well as transient killer whales. I use a decades-long database of killer whale detections to analyse how killer whale presence has changed in the region over time.
Using Hidden Markov models I demonstrate a method for analyzing ecological indicators in the presence of regime shifts using sea surface temperature and seabird density as case studies.