September 2015 - Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Laboratory

By Courtney Hann

The Whale mAPP team of Lei Lani Stelle, Melo King of Smallmelo Geographic Information Services, and me (Courtney Hann) has been busy recruiting ocean enthusiasts and applying for grants to fund volunteer-suggested Whale mAPP revisions. As a refresher, Whale mAPP is an Android-based mobile application that can be used by anyone to record marine mammal (whale, dolphins, porpoises, pinniped) sightings around the world. It is easy to sign up as a beta tester on the Whale mAPP website, www.whalemapp.org, and use the mobile app on your personal device to help scientists and conservationists learn more about marine mammals.

What is most spectacular is that the app has truly gone global! We now have over 100 users and are getting a couple new user requests each week! These volunteers have been busy at work this summer, recording thousands of marine mammal sightings during the summer months. Sightings have streamed in from the U.S. West Coast, Hawaiian, Japanese, and Russian waters, the Caribbean, the middle of the Southern Ocean, and the Greenland Sea. You can click on any sighting on the web map to see details about what species were recorded, how many were seen, what their behavior was like, the weather conditions that day, and other notes.

This map shows global marine mammal sightings recorded by Whale mAPP volunteers. The blue whale tale icons represent whale sightings, the pink dolphin icons represent dolphin or porpoise sightings, and the orange seal icon represents a seal, sea lion, or sea otter sighting. Data recorded during each sighting include the location (automatic), the species, the weather and sea conditions, the number of individuals, and a five-star confidence rating (http://www.whalemapp.org/map/#/, CEBCO, DeLorme | Melodi King, MS GIS Program – Cohort 21, University of Redlands).

If we zoom into my particular study area of Southeast Alaska, we see that volunteers are still doing a superb job at recording the abundant number of marine mammals in the area.

Zoomed in image of the northeast Pacific, showing marine mammal sightings recorded this summer in Alaska, Southeast Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington (http://www.whalemapp.org/map/#/, CEBCO, DeLorme | Melodi King, MS GIS Program – Cohort 21, University of Redlands).

Initial funding through the California Coastal Commission Whale Tail grant facilitated the creation of the Whale mAPP project, while current funding from the Hatfield Marine Science Center’s Mamie Markham Research Award that I received this Spring 2015 is funding the top two revisions requested by our users:
(1) Enable the user to edit observations during a trip and after a trip has ended. This revision is huge, was requested by almost every user I spoke to in Southeast Alaska, and was shown very evidently in our survey results.
(2) Add site-specific animal behavior and descriptions to Whale mAPP. For Southeast Alaska, this means adding the famous bubble-net feeding behavior to our list, as well as important descriptions of how to identify, recognize, and understand marine mammal behaviors.
In addition to the above two revisions, a few other revisions will be completed by Smallmelo Geographic Information Services this winter. These revisions include improving world-wide coverage of region-specific species lists, creating tools for validating the quality of the data, enabling data downloads directly from the website (www.whalemapp.org), and including the beta-tested “marine mammal fun facts” into the global application.

All of these incredible accomplishments and progress toward a successful, educational, fun, and data-generating marine mammal citizen science project could not have happened without Dr. Lei Lani’s open mind toward incorporating more people, including me, into her Whale mAPP project. Whale mAPP represents a new age of scientists, one of collaboration across disciplines (ecology, statistics, coding, education, and more!), and one that over-steps previous boundaries to re-define science. I hope that my participation with Whale mAPP and future citizen science projects will inspire individuals to know and feel that they can be scientists and that we can inspire the world to work together for the common good of our oceans.

**GUEST POST** written by Solène Derville from the Institute of Research for Development, Nouméa, New Caledonia. Entropie Lab

Last term I posted about the analysis of Maui dolphin habitat selection I have undergone under Dr Leigh Torres’ supervision at OSU. The results of this work are now compiled in a manuscript which I hope to submit for publication very soon.

Since I last posted on this blog, many things have changed for me: I went back to France at the end of May (with a heavy heart from leaving Newport and my dear lab mates) and I have graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Lyon and successfully completed my Biology Master’s degree. In September, I will start a PhD on the spatial ecology of Humpback Whales in New Caledonia. I will work at the French ‘Institut de Recherche pour le Développement’ in Nouméa, New Caledonia, under the co-supervision of Dr Claude Payri, Dr Claire Garrigue, Dr Corina Iovan (IRD) and Dr Leigh Torres (GEMM Lab, OSU).

Before telling you a bit more about my project and this summer field season, I would like to introduce the beautiful place where I will be spending the next 3 years. New Caledonia is an archipelago located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, east of Australia. This special overseas French collectivity includes a main island (Grande Terre) and several other islands such as the Loyalty Islands. New Caledonia’s lagoon is the largest in the world and was added to the list of the UNESCO world heritage sites in 2008, because of its exceptional biodiversity including many emblematic species such as humpback whales, dugongs, marine turtles, manta rays…and many others.

).New Caledonia location in South Pacific Ocean (map: http://springtimeofnations.blogspot.jp

Map of the New Caledonian Archipelago (map: http://crosbiew.wordpress.com).

Moreover, the ‘Natural Park of the Coral Sea’ was established very recently by the New Caledonian to protect this biodiversity hotspot. This monumental marine park spans 1.3 million square kilometres and is, to date, the largest protected area on the planet. As the detailed management plan for this park will be progressively established in the coming years, there is a local need for more information about marine mega-fauna space use in order to define key areas for wildlife conservation. Thus, the description of the humpback whales ecological niche in New Caledonian waters is the next logical step to initiate conservation planning. The effect of human activities needs to be investigated as the New Caledonian humpback whales population forms an isolated breeding sub-stock and is exposed to mining industry intensification, shipping, harbour construction and boat recreation associated to tourism development.

The general aim of my project is to investigate how humpback whales are using their habitat within and between reproductive areas of Oceania in order to facilitate their conservation at the scale of giant marine reserves (new generation of marine protected areas over vast surfaces exceeding hundreds of thousands of square kilometres). I will therefore focus on the spatial ecology of humpback whales in the New Caledonian Exclusive Economic Zone, with several specific aims:

1/ to quantify the spatio-temporal patterns and dynamics of humpback whale distribution in New Caledonian waters in order to identify key areas for the species and determine if these areas change over time or depending on social context.

2/ to assess the connectivity and movement patterns between areas of interest at individual scale.

3/ to document humpback whale use of habitat in relation to environmental factors and include these results in the broader-context of the South Pacific Ocean breeding areas.

4/ to provide a spatial and temporal assessment of the anthropogenic activities risks to humpback whales in New Caledonia.

I will rely on a large amount of data collected between 1991 and present, and provided by Opération Cétacés (an NGO involved in scientific research on humpback whales and other marine mammals in Oceania since 1996), including boat-based, land-based and aerial observations, satellite tracking and individual-based information (via Photo-Identification and genotyping).

This year, I am taking part in the summer field mission undergone by Opération Cétacés in the South Lagoon. I am currently living in Prony, a little village located along the southern coast of Grande Terre. No electricity, no internet, whale watching from 7am to 4pm on a daily basis: the real life!

In my next post I will tell you a bit more about this field trip with Opération Cétacés but for now, I will let you enjoy these few pictures!

Rémi, Claire and Daisy standing next to the “Cap N’Dua” lighthouse from which land observations are made. Whales can be spotted up to 20 nautical miles offshore (© S. Derville)

Inverted peduncle slap (the whale is lying upside down in the water and energetically slapping the surface with its fluke) (© S. Derville).

Month: September 2015

Whale mAPP Goes Global!

From Oregon to New Caledonia: Crossing latitudes

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