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New Directions in Marine Mammal Behavioral Noise Exposure Criteria10Marine Research of the National Academy of Marine ResearchDOI: 10.29677/MR.202406_4(1).00014 CONCLUSIONS Major progress has been made in the last two decades both in increasingly robust and controlled measurements of the effects of noise on marine mammals and in methods of interpreting and applying scienceto predict and better mitigate negative effects. This paper evaluates recent and ongoing developments in scientific and exposure criteria, and presents the following concluding synthesis assessments in several areas: This paper was inspired by panel discussions at several recent international acoustics meetings organizaed by Dr. Tom Akamatsu. I appreciate his invitations to me for those, as well as his long-standing contributions to the field of marine bioacoustics. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSExposure criteria for discrete (acute) exposure events are maturing and are being increasingly applied in practical regulatory assessments. The combined scientific understanding of noise effects on distrubance demonstrate variability, sometimes extensive, within and between individuals and species, sources, and contexts. Early concepts of all-or-nothing response \lable information. Probabilistic functions within certain species, contextual, and noise source types have been developed and are increasingly being improved and validated with experimental data.Fundamentally different approaches to developing exposure criteria for long-term, broad-scale, population-level impact assessment are needed. While daunting and requiring of substantial support and effort, such efforts can benefit from the overall approaches to noise criteria development that precede them. These have included multi-disciplinary specialists interacting with policy managers with the goal of using empirical data and robust statistical approaches to develop practical, generalizable methods. A key difference in this should be a deliberately international perspective on these challenges from the outset.Increasingly robust characterizations of exposure acoustic and contextual characteristics relative to responses of differing severity for different types of behavior are available, including with experimental methods and increasingly realistic anthropogenic noise sources. Perhaps the most critical next steps in this field are to continue expanding knowledge of population level consequences of disturbance, as well as the interaction of industrial noise and presence with other environmental stressors, and to develop broadly applicable ways of applying this knowledge.