Assessing the non-lethal effects of disturbance from human activities is necessary for wildlife conservation and management. However, linking short-term responses to long-term impacts on individuals and populations is a significant hurdle for evaluating the risks of a proposed activity. The Population Consequences of Disturbance (PCoD) framework conceptually describes how disturbance can lead to changes in population dynamics, and its real-world application has led to a suite of quantitative models that can inform risk assessments. Here, we review PCoD models that forecast the possible consequences of a range of disturbance scenarios for marine mammals. In so doing, we identify common themes and highlight general principles to consider when assessing risk. We find that, when considered holistically, these models provide valuable insights into which contextual factors influence a population's degree of exposure and sensitivity to disturbance. We also discuss model assumptions and limitations, identify data gaps and suggest future research directions to enable PCoD models to better inform risk assessments and conservation and management decisions. The general principles explored can help wildlife managers and practitioners identify and prioritize the populations most vulnerable to disturbance and guide industry in planning activities that avoid or mitigate population-level effects.

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Bioenergetic approaches are increasingly used to understand how marine mammal populations could be affected by a changing and disturbed aquatic environment. There remain considerable gaps in our knowledge of marine mammal bioenergetics, which hinder the application of bioenergetic studies to inform policy decisions. We conducted a priority-setting exercise to identify high-priority unanswered questions in marine mammal bioenergetics, with an emphasis on questions relevant to conservation and management. Electronic communication and a virtual workshop were used to solicit and collate potential research questions from the marine mammal bioenergetic community. From a final list of 39 questions, 11 were identified as ‘key’ questions because they received votes from at least 50% of survey participants. Key questions included those related to energy intake (prey landscapes, exposure to human activities) and expenditure (field metabolic rate, exposure to human activities, lactation, time-activity budgets), energy allocation priorities, metrics of body condition and relationships with survival and reproductive success and extrapolation of data from one species to another. Existing tools to address key questions include labelled water, animal-borne sensors, mark-resight data from long-term research programs, environmental DNA and unmanned vehicles. Further validation of existing approaches and development of new methodologies are needed to comprehensively address some key questions, particularly for cetaceans. The identification of these key questions can provide a guiding framework to set research priorities, which ultimately may yield more accurate information to inform policies and better conserve marine mammal populations.