On 17 September 2020 a whale detection system for blue whales in the Santa Barbara Channel was launched as part of the Benioff Ocean Initiative. The goal of the Whale Safe is to provide up to date information on whale and ship overlapping occurrence and to increase awareness of the ship strike issue. While Cascadia strongly supports efforts to reduce ship strikes and has extensively studied this issue, we have commented on some concerns about the limitations of the current initiative and John Calambokidis was quoted in some of the articles on this new program related to this. See for example:
New tool alerts ships when whales are near. But will they slow down?
Whale ‘roadkill’ is on the rise off California. A new detection system could help
