Anthropogenic footprints are invading global habitats of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins

Abstract

As ecologically fragile areas, coastal zones are affected by both anthropogenic activities and climate change. However, the impacts of these factors on large nearshore mammals, such as Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins (IPHDs, Sousa chinensis), are poorly understood. Here, modeling revealed that the suitable habitats of IPHDs are affected mainly by the sea surface temperature (SST), and the habitat suitability decreases as the distance to the nearest coastline increases. In addition, anthropogenic activities involving demersal fishing, contamination and shipping have narrowed IPHD habitats and reduced the habitat suitability. We found that climate change will further narrow suitable habitats located farther than 7 km from coastlines and trigger habitat losses in the eastern Taiwan Strait by 2090-2100 under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 scenario. The projected decreases in habitat suitability and area emphasize the urgency of establishing connected marine protected areas (MPAs) while considering climate change, intergovernmental cooperation, and public involvement.

Keywords

Anthropogenic activities / Climate change / Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins / Habitat shifts / MaxEnt modeling

Declaration of Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant No. 41901349), Marine Economy Development Foundation of Guangdong Province (Grant No. GDNRC [2022]21), Basic Scientific Research Program of National Nonprofit Research Institutes (Grant No. ZX2022QT025), and the Startup Foundation for Talented Scholars in South China Normal University (Grant No. 8S0472). We thank the reviewers and editors for their valuable comments on this paper. We are grateful for the Bio-ORACLE database, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) database, Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), Resource and Environmental Science and Data Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Halpern et al. (2015) and other data sources regarding Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins in this paper for sharing data.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi: 10.1016/j.geosus.2022.12.001.

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