Cindy Peter

University Malaysia Sarawak · Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation

We reviewed Coram et al. (Biodivers Conserv 30:2341–2359, 2021, https://doi.org/10. 1007/s10531-021-02196-6), a paper that highlights the use of social media data to under- stand marine litter and marine mammals in Southeast Asia. While we commend its intent, we find that the methodology used and conclusions drawn portray an incomplete and inac- cu...

Fisheries bycatch has been identified as the greatest threat to marine mammals worldwide. Characterizing the impacts of bycatch on marine mammals is challenging because it is difficult to both observe and quantify, particularly in small-scale fisheries where data on fishing effort and marine mammal abundance and distribution are often limited. The...

Marine mammal bycatch poses a particular challenge in developing countries, where data to document bycatch and its effects are often lacking. Using the Bycatch Risk Assessment (ByRA) toolkit, based on InVEST open-source models, we chose 4 field sites in Southeast Asia with varying amounts of data on marine mammals and fishing occurrence: Trat provi...

Commercial logging is a major economic activity in the Upper Baleh catchment, Sarawak, so logged-over forest is the dominant forest type there. Avifauna survey was conducted in the logged-over forest of Upper Baleh in November 2015 as part of the Upper Baleh Heart of Borneo Expedition. The objective of the survey was to collect baseline data on the...

IN THEIR POLICY Forum “U.S. seafood import restriction presents opportunity and risk” (16 December, p. 1372), R. Williams et al. describe some possible effects of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rule requiring that seafood imported into the United States must come from fisheries that comply with the U.S. Marine Mamma...

Dolphin-watching tourism is growing globally. In developing countries, the typically low environmental awareness of operators and poorly enforced or non-existent regulations exacerbate risks to wildlife. Ecological indicators like behavioural responses are useful to assess wildlife tourism, but obtaining such data is slow and expensive. We modified...

Irrawaddy dolphins, Orcaella brevirostris, in the Kuching Bay, Sarawak, Malaysia have been subjected to pressure from cetacean-fisheries interactions, dolphin watching tourism and coastal development. However, very little information is known about their ecology and factors driving their habitat preferences. To obtain critical information on the di...

Current study intends to formulate a habitat suitability model of a newly surveyed marine mammal species where the research scenario is characterized by real-world data that is scarce with no detail demographic value available. It is extremely challenging to solve it using either traditional statistical approaches where huge amount of data are requ...

Cetacean surveys using line-transect and photo-identification methodology were conducted in Kuching Bay, Sarawak, Malaysia from March through September, 2011 and 2012 and from March through May 2013. During surveys fishing vessels and fishing effort were recorded to quantify the scale of artisanal fisheries in the bay. A total of 3670 km and 248 ho...

Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins (Sousa chinensis) are documented from various locations along Borneo's coast, including three sites in Sarawak, Malaysia, three sites in Sabah, Malaysia, three locations in Kalimantan, Indonesia and the limited coastal waters of the Sultanate of Brunei. Observations in all these areas indicate a similar external morph...

Support vector machines (SVMs) is a powerful machine learning algorithm for classification particularly in medical, image processing and text analysis related studies. Nonetheless, its application in ecology is scarce. This study aims to demonstrate and compare the classification performance of SVMs models developed with weights and models develope...

The presence of cutaneous nodules is reported in vulnerable populations of Irrawaddy dolphins Orcaella brevirostris from Malaysia (Kuching, Bintulu-Similajau, Kinabatangan-Segama and Penang Island), India (Chilika Lagoon) and Bangladesh (Sundarbans). Approximately 5700 images taken for photo-identification studies in 2004 to 2013 were examined for...

Small boat surveys were conducted in the Kuching Bay area of Sarawak, East Malaysia, in order to determine the distribution and abundance of coastal cetaceans. Photographic data collected from Jul.2007 through Oct.2010 was used to generate mark-recapture abundance estimates of Irrawaddy dolphins in the study area, and provided insights into ranging...

Small boat surveys were conducted in the Kuching Bay area of Sarawak, East Malaysia, in order to determine the distribution and abundance of coastal cetaceans. Photographic data collected from Jul.2007 through Oct.2010 was used to generate mark-recapture abundance estimates of Irrawaddy dolphins in the study area, and provided insights into ranging...

Community workshops were held in coastal locations in Sarawak to raise awareness of cetacean conservation. Interviews were conducted up to 2 years later in four “workshop communities” as well as four villages where workshops were not conducted. Comparison of responses between respondents who had attended workshops (n = 127) versus those who had not...

Between June 2008 and September 2009, 56 days of small boat surveys were conducted off the coast of Sarawak, Malaysia with the aim of recording cetacean distribution. These surveys, which focused on the Miri, Bintulu-Similajau and Kuching regions, comprised 173 hours of survey effort and covered 2851 km of pre-determined systematic tracks. Surveys...