Bjarni is head of the marine mammal section at the Faroe Marine Research Institute, with 25 years of experience in marine mammal research. Main research includes distribution, migration and abundance as well as feeding ecology and life history of marine mammals in Faroese waters. One main research field is biologging, where the main effort has been on tracking the pilot whales from Faroese waters.

Christian is a senior scientist at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø, Norway. He has worked with Arctic marine mammals for more than 40 years. Most of the work has been conducted in the Svalbard area. He has been involved in projects on a variety of aspects of the biology of the marine mammals in this area, including many studies that involves attaching various biologgers to seals, walruses and whale species.

Kenji Konishi received his PhD from Hokkaido University. He spent the early years of his career studying the biology of pinnipeds and their parasites from fish prey. After joining the Institute of Cetacean Research in 2002, he actively engaged in whale sampling, sighting, and tagging surveys in the North Pacific and the Antarctic. Kenji’s past research work includes studies on the diet, nutritional condition, and behaviour of baleen whales in both ocean basins. He also worked on the trend analyses of nutritional condition in the Antarctic minke whale with Norwegian colleagues and contributed to the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission. Currently he is studying the diving behaviour, response to environmental changes and stock structure of blue, fin, sei, Bryde’s, common and Antarctic minke whales using satellite-monitored tags.

Luis A. Pastene is a Chilean marine biologist working currently as the Head of Science of the Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR) in Tokyo. Luis has field experience working with cetaceans (sighting surveys, biopsy sampling, photo-ID) in several oceans of the world. He is specialised in the analysis of population structure of baleen whale species in both Antarctic and western North Pacific, based on neutral genetic markers such as mitochondrial DNA sequences and microsatellite DNA. Luis has participated actively in the scientific committees or working groups of international organisations in charge of conservation and management of marine resources such as the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO), and the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). Luis considers that the outputs of the MINTAG project will assist enormously in the refinement of the hypotheses of movement and stock structure of baleen whales in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, proposed by genetic analyses.

Mads Peter is a professor at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources with 40+ years of work experience with marine mammals in the Arctic. He pioneered in 1990s the technique with using an airgun for deploying satellite transmitters on large whales, and has since worked with developing several new and innovative techniques for tracking and collecting of biologging data from cetaceans.

Martin has extensive experience in marine mammal research. He has worked extensively with the development of innovative satellite instrumentation methods for the study of migratory patterns and ecophysiology in marine mammals, as well as instrumentation for collecting oceanographic data using marine mammals. Martin has also been involved in recent work using satellite tags and high-resolution dataloggers to study humpback and killer whales in Northern Norway and humpbacks and fin whales in the Southern Ocean. Since 2018, Martin has been employed at the Institute of Marine Research, within the marine mammal research group, and took over the leadership of the group in October 2021. He is responsible for population modelling and assessment of ice-breeding seals (harp and hooded seals), and currently co-chair the working group on harp and hooded seals (WGHARP) of the International Council of the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). He is a member of the NAMMCO (North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission) Scientific Committee, and a national delegate to both NAMMCO and the International Whaling Commission.

Sandra is a senior marine mammal expert at the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute of Iceland (since 2008), and head of Seal Research Department at the Icelandic Seal Center. She has a PhD in marine mammal population ecology. Sandra has been Principal Investigator of the harbour seal and grey seal population monitoring programs in Iceland since 2008, including bi-annual aerial population censuses, monitoring of pup production and management advice. She leads several research projects focusing on anthropogenic impacts on marine mammal populations due to effects of tourism and interactions with fishing industry, including behaviour studies, tagging of animals and dietary studies. Further, she has experience in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research working closely with stakeholders.

Nils is a scientist at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research, Bergen, Norway. He is responsible for the whale survey program at the institute and the management of minke whales. Especially in that context the MINTAG program will be of importance to gain knowledge about the annual migrations and habitat use of minke whales.

Rikke’s research field is the temporal and spatial distribution and abundance of marine mammals, especially cetaceans, in Greenland. She works as a senior advisor at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources (since 2007), leading research projects and developing long-term monitoring schemes relating to the abundance and distributions of cetaceans. Data from the MINTAG project on surfacing times at specific dates and times will be of great value when correcting abundance of baleen whales.