How NASA will help protect endangered whales

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

NASA technology has been used countless times to study new worlds outside of our solar system and to monitor the Earth’s climate, but an initiative set to be launched later on this year plans to harness the US space agency’s satellite technology to help protect endangered whales.

As announced on Monday, the forthcoming WhaleWatch online tool, which will be run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and funded by NASA, is designed to decrease whale mortality resulting due to collisions with shipping and fishing gear.

Bruce Mate, director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University and one of the scientists behind WhaleWatch, explained that nearly one-fourth of the 12,000 blue whales alive today live in the Pacific Ocean. Those creatures travel, along with other endangered whales, up and down heavily trafficked regions of the California coast.

As they travel, those creatures face the risk of injury or death due to a collision with a vessel, or by becoming so tangled up in fishing gear that they cannot feed or rise to the surface to breathe. WhaleWatch will seek to prevent incidents like this from happening, NASA explained.

Show me the whales!

Using data collected from four tagged whale species and satellite observations provided by the space agency and other groups, WhaleWatch will show the most likely locations of blue, gray, fin, and humpback whales along the west coast of the US and Canada for any given month.

It will use the most recent environmental conditions as the basis for its projections, and will also be able to predict the movement of blue whales for any given day, NASA said. The project was funded by the agency’s Applied Sciences Program and is scheduled to be released on the NOAA West Coast Regional website in the second half of 2015.

“The real way to reduce the risk of a whale getting hit is to reduce the overlap [of whales and vessels],” Monica DeAngelis, a marine mammal scientist at NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, said. “When we sit down at the table to talk to people… the first question is where are the whales?”

Previously, experts were forced to rely on infrequent surveys of the whales migration to predict where the creatures would be travelling, but WhaleWatch will given them up-to-date data on the location of the whales. By combining whale tag data with ocean depth and sea surface temperature measurements, chlorophyll concentration, and sea surface, up-to-date data should be achieved.

The scientists behind the project analyzed the data to find patterns between environmental cues and whale movements, including where they tended to stop and feed during different times of the year. By assembling all of this information, the WhaleWatch program calculates which areas are the most likely to have whales at any given time, then they plot the data on a map.

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