Grant: Alliance Grants

Every year, the St. Lawrence Estuary hosts a large number and variety of whales, which gather here to feed in these rich waters. These feeding grounds are shared with commercial fishermen, and crossed by a busy commercial shipping lane. To reduce the risk of interactions between marine activities and these animals, it is necessary to detect the whales in near-real time. An emerging monitoring technology, known as Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), has the potential to answer this challenge. It converts an unused fibre-optic strand from a submarine cable into a large listening array using a specialized tool called an interrogator at the end of the cable on land. This project brings together the expertise of the ISMER-UQAR, Cornell University and Merinov, in collaboration with TELUS Canada, Parks Canada, Wolastoqiyik Wahsipekuk First Nation and the Agence Mamu Innu Kaikusseth, to assess the performances of DAS for baleen whale monitoring in the St-Lawrence estuary (SLE). In this two-year project, we want to identify optimal parameters for the detection of different species of large whales by DAS, and compare the performance of this tool with traditional monitoring methods.