Ocean Wise and Washington Maritime Blue work to improve whale sightings data

Two Green Marine supporters, Washington Maritime Blue’s Quiet Sound initiative and global conservation organization Ocean Wise, have collaborated with others to improve the information about whale locations available to commercial West Coast mariners.

As a result, whale detections from a popular Puget Sound sightings network are now being fed into a transboundary (Canada-U.S.) alert system to significantly increase mariner awareness of nearby whales.

The Whale Report Alert System (WRAS) sends real-time alerts to commercial mariners when they are within 10 nautical miles of a confirmed whale sighting. Mariners can use the information available through the free app to alter their course or to slow down to reduce their possible impacts on whales.

Until recently, the WRAS app developed by Ocean Wise had sightings reported almost exclusively from Canadian waters only. Orca Network, a Washington State NGO, is now providing the whale sighting information that it receives through Facebook, phone and emails messages from its network in Puget Sound and throughout the endangered Southern resident killer whale’s range into WRAS. It first makes sure that all the information is vetted.

To plug Orca Network’s sightings into the alert system, Ocean Wise developed a new application programming interface (API) for WRAS. Open-source developers with Acartia connected the local sightings network to WRAS through the Acartia data cooperative.

Acartia is a decentralized data cooperative designed for sharing locations of marine mammals in the Salish Sea as well as the entire coastline between California and Alaska. Through its public API, Acartia provides open access to real-time and archived data provided by community scientists.