Over the last 50 years, international public concern regarding human impact on the environment has increased drastically. Specific to the maritime domain, attention has more acutely focused during the last ten years on the temporal and spatial relationships of marine mammals’ strandings to the use of active sonar. The NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC) has been at the forefront of research regarding the interaction of marine mammals and active sonar. In 1999, NURC established one of the first research programs in the world to address this topic, the Sound Ocean Living Marine Resources (SOLMAR) program, now known as the Marine Mammal Risk Mitigation (MMRM) program. With the participation of numerous international partners, marine mammal risk mitigation policies, procedures, and technologies were implemented, and continue to be developed, to minimize the potential impact on marine mammals.

Ryan, K. 2008. The interaction of marine mammals and active sonar. Oceanography 21(2):38–43, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2008.51.

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