Conservation

This funding supports the conservation community's efforts to increase the pressure on bad actors while empowering local law enforcement officials with the data and evidence tools needed to perform successful arrests. We also collaborate with philanthropies, governmental departments, and NGOs to promote the sharing of data and other information across 10 different African borders.

The Kelp Monitoring Program builds on our 2016 four-year grant with Puget Sound Restoration Fund. The program will engage and train professional and volunteer diver networks, expand monitoring platforms and deploy robotic systems to keep “Eyes on Kelp” and accumulate important data that leads to better protective measures for this critical and vanishing ecosystem.

To improve the collection of relevant data, Prof. Sam Wasser and his team at the Center for Conservation Biology, University of Washington are comparing stress, nutrition, and reproductive hormones in SRKW feces as well as developing more efficient methods to measure toxins and microbiome in those same samples. The results of these studies will yield key information about whether a lack of prey is the primary reason for the declining SRKW population, providing policy makers with important data to inform management actions.

Our Automated Aerial Photo Analysis of Southern Resident Killer Whales Project seeks to understand the health of Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW). This is important because, so far, gathering data to determine the cause has been limited to using slow, expensive, labor-intensive photography-based tactics. We’re partnering with SR3 to develop advanced machine learning techniques and an associated end-user tool to help automate the process of collecting orca drone imagery and turn it into actionable metrics. The improved tools will allow users to better interact with the data to see trends and inform policy decisions.

The Salish Sea Marine Survival Project aims to understand the decline and support the recovery of juvenile salmon populations in the Salish Sea (the combined marine waters of Puget Sound and the Strait of Georgia). This is critical, because these populations have experienced up to a 10-fold decline in marine survival compared to coastal populations. This U.S.-Canada collaboration synthesizes information from more than 60 organizations and is committed to providing management recommendations based on these findings.

Salmon Safe works with landowners, developers, contractors, and municipalities to strategically apply market-based tools and incentives. Through Salmon-Safe certification and green building practices, the resulting improved water quality can increase salmon survival rates.