Principal investigator
Chris Taggart, Dalhousie University
Call
Cycle II
There is an urgent need for flexible and economic monitoring of whales and vessels to provide vessel-strike risk-reduction information; especially now focused on the Gulf of St Lawrence (GoSL). The research team, with stakeholder groups, will collaborate to address the need by generating, exchanging and exploiting new knowledge derived from passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), oceanographic, and vessel automatic information system (AIS) observational data. These data will continue to form the basis for characterizing and predicting the spatio-temporal distributions of at-risk whales, habitats, and vessel-threat. Products of this research will afford maritime operators the ability to respond to the unexpected presence of endangered whales with appropriate mitigation actions.