Whale entanglements disentangled through the lens of cumulative habitat compression
Fig 3
Cumulative habitat compression index – a method for tracking annual evolution of thermal habitat in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem per biogeographic region that highlights years above and below when thermal habitat was enhanced or truncated.
Cumulative HCI (cHCI) curves for all years starting from 1980. The cHCI curve for a given year is calculated by doing the cumulative sum of monthly value over the year starting in January. All cHCI curves are plotted in gray, with the long-term mean plotted with the black-dashed curve. Select years of low (2002, 2013; blue lines) and high (2015, 2016; orange and pink lines) coastwide humpback whale entanglement annual averages are highlighted with colored curves. The most recent year 2024 is shown in red, which is similar to 2015 and 2016 in most regions. See Fig 1 for regional biogeographic boundaries.