Just Be Maritime is delighted to announce that it has now partnered with the ORCA marine conservation charity, with our Officer Cadets now having the amazing opportunity to become ‘citizen scientists’ as ORCA OceanWatchers.
As a UK-based charity, ORCA are helping to raise awareness about the critical habitats and hotspots for whales and dolphins that can be found in our oceans, and have collated all of the sighting records made by their citizen scientists over nearly 30 years.
When it was founded, ORCA’s work was mainly focused in the North East Atlantic, but their citizen scientists are now in demand globally. This gives the charity even greater opportunities to monitor, study and safeguard whale and dolphin populations globally, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Our participating cadets will first complete an ‘Introduction to Whale and Dolphin Identification’ course before progressing on to become an ORCA OceanWatcher. They will then provide valuable marine conservation support to the charity via a Smartphone app, by collecting scientific data about the whales, dolphins and porpoises sighted during their ship appointments.
An ’Introduction to Ship Strike Mitigation’ course can also be completed by the cadets as it is designed to educate seafarers about the impact of ship strike on whales and help them to understand the best ways of mitigating such risk.
