Jan Haelters

TL;DR: The majority of the Belgian AAS have established selfsustaining populations, although for some species the establishment is uncertain or in need of verification, and some species are considered as cryptogenic species.

TL;DR: The cause of the increased numbers of carcasses in 1999 was unclear but did not include viral epizootics or net entanglement and a temporary increase in the porpoise population in the southern North Sea may have been responsible.

TL;DR: In this paper, an unprecedented set of survey data of a marine top predator, the harbor porpoise (Phocoena pycoena), collected in the UK (SCANS II, Dogger Bank), Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, was used to develop seasonal habitat-based density models for the central and southern North Sea.

TL;DR: This work used a drift model to map stranding probabilities and predict stranding patterns of cetacean carcasses under H0 across the North Sea, the Channel and the Bay of Biscay, for the period 1990–2009 and constructed the spatial and temporal null hypothesis for strandings.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed an alternative approach consisting of: (1) collating diverse survey data to maximise spatial and temporal coverage, (2) using detection functions to estimate variation in the surface area covered (km2) among these surveys, standardising measurements of effort and animal densities, and (3) developing species distribution models (SDM) that overcome issues with heterogeneous and uneven coverage.