0 m · Sunlight Zone
Spot them. Protect them.
A living map of where whales and ships collide — built from sightings, satellites, and the people who watch the water.
Scroll to descend↓
200 m · Twilight Zone
The Problem
20,000
whales killed by ships every year — and most are never even recorded.
A 2024 study put global ship-strike mortality at over twenty thousand large whales annually — far above earlier estimates. The crew rarely knows it happened. The animal sinks before it can be found.
60,000+
large vessels transit U.S. waters each year
Shipping lanes lie directly over whale feeding, breeding and migration routes. Whales surface to breathe and rest — into the path of ships too large to stop or turn in time.
80–90%
fewer lethal strikes when ships slow to 10 knots
Speed is the single most effective lever. Below ten knots the odds of a strike being fatal collapse. Seasonal slow zones save lives — but only where the risk is actually known.
That's why we built Whale Watch. We map collision risk in real time, so mariners, regulators and researchers know exactly where whales are most at risk — and what to do about it.
See where they're dying→500 m · The Victims
Eight species bear the brunt.
We model 77 cetacean taxa, but these eight are struck most often in US waters. Each is a focal target of our collision-risk models. View the full crosswalk →
North Atlantic Right WhaleThe most endangered large whale on Earth. Slow and coastal, overlapping heavily with East Coast shipping lanes.
Critically Endangered
pop. ~350
Blue WhaleThe largest animal on Earth, still recovering from whaling. Feeds in upwelling zones that overlap major routes.
Endangered
pop. ~10,000
Fin WhaleFast but surface-resting. Ship strikes are the single largest source of human-caused fin whale mortality.
Vulnerable
pop. ~100,000
Humpback WhaleSeveral populations remain endangered. Coastal lunging, breaching and resting bring them into vessel paths.
Least Concern
pop. ~80,000
Sei WhaleOne of the fastest baleen whales, but unpredictable surface feeding and frequent misID make monitoring hard.
Endangered
pop. ~50,000
Sperm WhaleDeep divers that rest motionless at the surface — nearly invisible to approaching ships in deep water.
Vulnerable
pop. ~800,000
Minke WhaleSmall and hard to spot, frequently struck by recreational boats and ferries in coastal areas.
Least Concern
pop. ~500,000
Killer WhaleSouthern Resident orcas (~75 left) face vessel disturbance, noise and strikes atop prey depletion.
Data Deficient
pop. ~50,000
1 000 m · Midnight Zone
So we lit up the dark.
Whale Watch maps collision risk across 1.8 million ocean cells — combining vessel traffic, whale sightings, ocean conditions and community reports into a single, living risk surface.
From the continental US to Alaska, Hawaii and the Caribbean — 2°S to 52°N, at ~1.22 km resolution. Zoom out for the coast-wide heatmap; zoom in for individual hexes.
Open the risk map→How the score is built
Seven signals, one risk score.
Every hex is percentile-ranked on seven sub-scores, then fused with expert-elicited weights from the literature (Vanderlaan & Taggart 2007, Rockwood 2021, Nisi 2024).
Traffic intensity
Vessel speed, volume, lethality, draft risk, night ops
Cetacean presence
OBIS sightings, baleen concentration, recency
Proximity blend
Distance-decay from whales, strikes, unprotected waters
Strike history
Historical NOAA ship-strike records here
Habitat suitability
Shelf-edge bathymetry and primary productivity
Protection gap
Distance from MPAs, no-take and seasonal zones
Reference risk
Nisi et al. 2024 global collision baseline
What you can do
Map it. Classify it. Report it.
Interactive risk map
Explore collision risk across the study area with 7 expert-weighted sub-scores per cell. Macro heatmap or high-res hex detail.
Open map→
Photo classification
Upload a whale photo; an EfficientNet-B4 model identifies the species from 8 classes. GPS photos get automatic risk context.
Classify a photo→
Audio classification
Submit underwater audio; an XGBoost/CNN pipeline segments it and extracts 64 acoustic features to identify the species.
Classify audio→
Interaction reports
Report whale interactions with photo and audio evidence. The AI classifies the species and generates a real-time advisory.
Report an interaction→
Vessel violations
Flag vessels speeding through slow zones, entering MPAs, or going dark on AIS. Community review sharpens the risk data.
Report a violation→
Climate forecasting
See how habitat and risk shift under CMIP6 scenarios from the 2030s to the 2080s. Compare projected oceans against today.
View projections→
4 000 m · The Abyss
And we ran it forward to 2080.
Twelve trained models power the platform — species distribution, photo and audio classifiers. Then we scored whale habitat on CMIP6 climate projections to see where tomorrow's hotspots emerge.
58M
projected risk cells, looking forward six decades.
1.8M hexes × 4 seasons × 2 emission scenarios × 4 decades. Each carries six sub-scores, per-species whale probabilities, and projected ocean conditions.
Explore the projections→Ocean projections
CMIP6 ensemble-mean SST, MLD, SLA and primary productivity at ~0.25° across the full study area.
Species redistribution
A 6-species ISDM+SDM ensemble predicts how blue, fin, humpback, sperm, right and minke habitat shifts under warming.
Four decades, two scenarios
The 2030s through 2080s under SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 — bracketing the plausible best- and worst-case futures.
Back toward the light
None of this works without you.
Every sighting you share sharpens the map. Recreational boaters, researchers and regulators all feed the same living record — and read it back through dashboards built for them.
Citizen science
Community sightings
Report whales with photo, audio and GPS. Members vote to verify; you earn reputation from Observer to Expert.
Browse the feed →
Expert analysis
Stakeholder insights
Five tailored dashboards — captains, policy, research, conservation, ports — translate the data into action.
Explore insights →
Ready to surface?
Open the map, classify a whale, report a sighting, or dive into the climate projections through 2080.