Last week I attended a workshop on the detection, classification, localization, and density estimation (DCLDE) of marine mammals. This field of inquiry is maturing around the development of more productive use of “Passive Acoustic Monitoring” (PAM) – which is essentially…
Apropos of Shell poking around in the Arctic – and perhaps an explanation of their 2012 foibles it may be worthwhile to remember the Inuit Sea Goddess Sedna. There are quite a few versions of this story; certain key elements…
In 1972 the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) was crafted as a response to scientific and public concern that certain marine mammals would become extinct unless they were protected by regulatory intervention. It was the first ecosystem based regulation –…
On Sunday June 28 the Environmental Volunteers Visitor Center will be inaugurating a “Sounds of San Francisco Bay” interactive media exhibit that I wrote and Gwynn designed and coded. We’re pretty happy with it as it gave us a chance…
I’ve just returned from a month of coast to coast ocean work and somehow I’ve accomplished this without even getting my feet wet. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges to ocean conservation and management is that the policy work occurs…
The United Nations General Assembly designated today, June 8 as “World Ocean Day,” acknowledging a tradition set forth in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. In 2002 – a decade later, the…
I’ve just finished up a week in Pittsburgh, PA at an Acoustics Society conference. Because sound and acoustics intersect so many fields, Society meetings are some of the most diverse gatherings of disciplines under one roof – with sessions on…
Last week found the OCR office and staff (Gwynn and myself) with a few hundred other ocean conservationists and activists out in Washington DC attending the fifth annual Blue Vision Summit. This convening has been growing in stature since its…
I’ve just spent that last couple of days in Houston at the annual Offshore Technologies Conference (OTC). Like many things in Texas, this event is HUGE – with some 90,000+ attendees from around the globe kicking tires and otherwise assessing…
Every year in April there are two events that give us all a chance to pause and appreciate; to dip deeply into gratitude and remember the vigilance and effort it takes to deter the voracious appetites of “capital market forces”…