BC Partners

Ocean Wise Conservation Association (Ocean Wise) is the lead partner for the Whale Trail in Canada. Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Ocean Wise is a Canadian not-for-profit conservation organization on a mission to build communities that take meaningful action to protect and restore the world’s oceans. With the climate crisis and one million species at risk of extinction, the next decade offers an extraordinary, but narrow, window of opportunity for the health of our oceans. Together – with business leaders, researchers, community members, governments and ocean lovers around the world –  they are monitoring and protecting whales, fighting climate change and restoring biodiversity, protecting and restoring fish stocks, innovating for a plastic free ocean, and educating and empowering youth. Ocean Wise’s conservation portfolio includes the Whales Initiative, which contains two core programs focused on reducing threats to whales through evidence-based solutions.

1) The Whale Health and Monitoring program uses applied research to achieve impactful conservation outcomes that protect whales globally. The program employs the latest scientific techniques, including drones, bioacoustics, artificial intelligence, and environmental DNA, to monitor whale health and develop innovative conservation tools designed to have the greatest impact on population recovery.

2) The Whale Report Alert System program operates an alert system which broadcasts pertinent details of whale presence to large commercial vessels. This awareness better enables shipmasters to undertake adaptive mitigation measures, such as increasing vigilance, slowing down, or diverting course in the vicinity of whales to reduce the risk of collision and disturbance. Information on whale presence is obtained from a wide range of partner data providers (e.g. Orca Network, WhaleSpotter, JASCO, SMRU, Conserve.io, Whale Alert Alaska) and from real-time observations reported to the Ocean Wise Sightings Network via the Whale Report app.

To learn more about Ocean Wise, visit ocean.org

Ocean Wise works closely with site hosts and community partners to identify and add new sites every year. The Whale Trail was expanded to BC in 2015 with the help of a steering committee of the following founding partners: