More than 150 years after Herman Melville published his classic novel, men in ships still seek whales. These days though, the majority of vessels spend their time trying to avoid them.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has recently established Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas off the East Coast and Caribbean, and the US Coast Guard has proposed new routes off California to keep whale and ship apart.
The fact that whale migration occurs seasonally makes the task of monitoring more problematic and, of course, whales don’t use AIS, so movement outside their ‘known’ areas of activity increases the risk of collision.
The NOAA, which administers east coast fisheries and whale protection areas, issues notices to mariners on whale movements on an ad hoc basis but these must be added to navigation charts by hand.
As Jens Schroder-Furstenberg of the German Maritime and Hydrographic Agency points out, the rigidity of the current S-57 ENC standard makes it hard to implement new information onto electronic databases despite the obvious advantages of using ECDIS to mark the danger zones.
In a recent article for Maritime Executive, Mr Schroder-Furstenberg suggests the roll-out of ECDIS and in particular the move to the IHO’s S-100 data standard provides an opportunity to include improved whale protection information in future ENCs and NMs.
The IHO working group on standardisation is already developing a product specification for Marine Protected Areas and Mr Schroder-Furstenberg believes use of the S-100 standard will make it possible to present the information to mariners in a more customisable way, improving safety for sailors and cetaceans alike.
Read the article: www.maritime-executive.com/article/whale-protection-areas-and-their-implementation-in-future-ecdis
Tags: ECDIS, S-100 standard, whales
