Assessing the impacts of climate change on Arctic marine mammals

While the Earth's climate has exhibited broad extremes over geologic time, there is general agreement that the effects of global warming ongoing now are accentuated in the Arctic, and that the rate of environmental change may be unprecedented. How marine mammals respond to environmental change depends on a species' adaptability, given its natural history and the temporal and spatial scale of perturbation. Although loss of sea ice as a platform for polar bears to hunt and walrus to rest grabs news headlines, there has been no rigorous effort to investigate either climate change or environmental responses, including those by humans, at the ecological scale of Arctic marine mammals. Here, we attempt just such an investigation through a collection of papers drafted by specialists in a cross-section of disciplines.