Mitigating Ship Strikes and Enhancing Carbon Sequestration in the Atlantic
The Atlantic Whale Deal project will test innovative technologies to mitigate ship strikes. Ships and whales co-occur across coastal and open sea areas, requiring transnational cooperation between multiple stakeholders to prevent collisions and biodiversity loss. The project aims to develop solutions to reduce ship strikes, thus enhancing carbon sequestration, given the whales’ pivotal role in ecosystem functioning. The project will produce (acoustic, visual, and thermal) detection and localization techniques, create maps of collision risk and acoustic contamination integrated into interactive tools, evaluate the ecosystem services provided by whales, and propose a long-term sustainable plan. Physicists, engineers, biologists, statisticians, designers, and socioeconomists from four countries of the Atlantic Area will join efforts towards effective solutions to benefit society through governmental, non-governmental, academic, and commercial bodies.