Research Projects

Beaked whales and active sonar

The last European Cetacean Society workshop on Active Sonar and Cetaceans (2004) helped to document the association between atypical mass strandings of beaked whales and naval sonar exercises. The exact mechanism by which sonar leads to the death of beaked whales remains unknown, but since the 2004 workshop there has been considerable progress on scientific knowledge on beaked whales and in mitigation techniques, including acoustic and visual detection, distribution mapping and modeling, discussed at a further ECS workshop on Beaked Whale Research (2007).

Ongoing research is mainly focused on the responses of individual beaked whales to naval active sonar, while a clear protocol on how to use these results for designing mitigation guidelines is currently lacking. Therefore an urgent requirement remains to design an effective monitoring and mitigation protocol to reduce the risks of intense sound sources damaging beaked whales.
This workshop aims to provide a background to the current field research investigating mitigation techniques, as well as a legal and official perspective about the feasibility of promoting a standardized mitigation protocol.