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A management strategy evaluation (MSE) is used to estimate success at achieving conservation goals for marine mammals while also aiming to minimize impacts on commercial fisheries. It is intended to improve understanding of US import rules that require countries exporting fish and fish products to the USA to adhere to marine mammal bycatch standards “comparable” to those used by the USA. The MSE framework is applied, for illustrative purposes, to export fisheries in Iceland that impact harbor porpoises (Phocoena phocoena), harbor seals (Phoca vitulina), and grey seals (Halichoerus grypus). Several management strategies are evaluated. The harbor porpoise population is estimated to be close to or above its maximum net productivity level (MNPL) and, according to the model, will continue to increase even if current levels of human-caused mortality are unchanged. In contrast, the grey seal and harbor seal populations are below MNPL, and bycatch mortality in the lumpfish (Cyclopterus lumpus) fishery will need to be reduced to allow them to recover to MNPL.

There is increasing evidence that the ∼20 routinely monitored perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) account for only a fraction of extractable organofluorine (EOF) occurring in the environment. To assess whether PFAS exposure is being underestimated in marine mammals from the Northern Hemisphere, we performed a fluorine mass balance on liver tissues from 11 different species using a combination of targeted PFAS analysis, EOF and total fluorine determination, and suspect screening. Samples were obtained from the east coast United States (US), west and east coast of Greenland, Iceland, and Sweden from 2000 to 2017. Of the 36 target PFASs, perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) dominated in all but one Icelandic and three US samples, where the 7:3 fluorotelomer carboxylic acid (7:3 FTCA) was prevalent. This is the first report of 7:3 FTCA in polar bears (∼1000 ng/g, ww) and cetaceans (

Due to increasing interest in wildlife tourism, there is a growing need to consider the balance between use and protection of wildlife. Mutual exchange and acceptance of research results between different academic disciplines, such as wildlife ecology and tourism research, has until recently been scarce. Absence of discipline-independent guidance on the management of wildlife tourism, in combination with a lack of knowledge-transfer from academia to society regarding how human impact can be reduced, may contribute to unintended disturbance of wildlife. Here we present a methodology, where use and protection constitute equal importance within wild animal watching, by showing how a synergetic gain of combining knowledge from different academic disciplines may occur and be implemented in order to decrease potential human disturbance on harbour seals (Phoca vitulina). Further, we suggest that improved transferal of interdisciplinary research from academia to industry increases understanding of the wildlife tourism industry and has the potential to change tourist behaviour and hence minimise disturbance of wild animals. We exemplify this possibility by combining results from two case studies derived from biology and tourism research. The aim of both was to study potential human disturbance on harbour seals (P. vitulina) during land based seal-watching. The combined findings indicate that more attention should be paid to understanding and communicating the types of tourist behaviour likely to cause distress.

Rapidly increasing tourist flows to the Arctic North have put focus on the sustainable development of tourism in natural environments. The Wild North project shows how different stakeholders in a network across the Arctic North deal with the need for a development of sustainable use of wildlife in a tourism context by using interdisciplinary research, active cooperation, and exchange of knowledge. The wildlife focused in this international project consists of arctic foxes, whales, seals, and birds. The project demand came from the tourism industry and was taken up by public organizations and academies within nature protection and tourism management. The project has also the maintainability of a destination in focus together with its sustainability.