Mitigating Commercial Vessel Impacts on Coastal Whales

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Technological advances have led to new tools that have created a monitoring revolution in how we observe marine mammals and their habitat. These new tools include using such data platforms as satellites, autonomous gliders and underwater hydrophones. The data are often paired with traditional field-based human observations that are collected episodically. A major challenge is how to combine all the information coming from different data streams with statistical models. The objectives of this projects are to fill statistical methodological gaps to better understand what factors inform movement of an endangered population of Southern Resident killer whales (SRKW). The core of this proposal is to develop methods to fully integrate the information coming from data streams collected at different temporal and spatial scales with statistical models. This problem is known as data assimilation, which in this proposal has the specific goal of providing forecasts of SRKW movement towards and through regions of high collision risk with commercial vessels. This will be the first framework for an advance warning system of whale movement in the shipping lanes that service the coastal ports of the Salish Sea including the major Canadian ports of Vancouver, Squamish and Victoria, and the American ports servicing population centres in Puget Sound. Some of the expected outcomes are fewer collisions between ships and whales, lower received sound levels by increasing distance between ships and whales, and to motivate policy change that could require vessels to reroute or slowdown in the vicinity of SRKW. This proposal centres on the following short-term (5 year) goals: 1) Using state space models and data assimilation methods to forecast whale movement in and adjacent to shipping lanes 2) Supporting machine learning developments to improve remote detection and classification of marine mammals using hydrophones and passive acoustics 3) Designing an optimal experiment in a region of complex geometry to place listening hydrophones to detect marine mammals (autonomous hydrophones) Although, the methods proposed here are focussed on a specific conservation need, the development of new methods for processing and assimilating these new data types into models will have broad application. The whale conservation issues faced here are becoming ubiquitous as trends in commercial shipping and global trade increase. Therefore, the outcomes of this research will have broad application to other coastal regions juggling conservation priorities with global trade pressures. My long term goal is to build my research and my lab to contribute to conservation research by using evidence-based science to influence public policy. This proposal supports my long term goals of creating a centre of marine science at SFU. Through multi-disciplinary scholarship, the next generation of marine scientists could be trained to help find solutions to real world conservation problems.