Cascadia Scientific Services

Cascadia Scientific Services LLC (CSS) is a small business registered in Washington State (and listed in the Federal government’s System for Award Management) that is wholly owned by Cascadia Research Collective. We established CSS in 2022 to allow us to accept contracts that are set aside by the Federal or State governments for small businesses. CSS employees and contractors are able to use CRC datasets for analyses, thus building on the many years of work CRC has undertaken in Hawai‘i and elsewhere.

Contracts received through CSS include:

• 2022-2023. Analyses of Cascadia’s false killer whale photo-identification data from Hawai‘i, estimating age of individuals, examining evidence for prior fisheries interactions, and assessing body condition. Two papers have been published on this work: Harnish et al. (2024) on fisheries interactions, examining both mouthline and dorsal fin injuries, and Kratofil et al. (2026) on age estimation from data available from our photo-identification catalog.
• 2022-2023. Support for analyses being led by the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center to estimate beaked whale abundance from drifting acoustic recorders in the Marianas. At CSS, Jay Barlow led this work, including analyses of dive data from Blainville’s beaked whales and goose-beaked whales world-wide, to characterize the variability in diving patterns. One paper on beaked whale diving behavior has been published (Barlow et al. 2026) and another on beaked whale density and abundance in Hawai‘i and the Marianas is in review (Gardner et al. in review). 
• 2025-2026. Collaborators from Cascadia (Elizabeth Becker) and the Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center have updated the habitat-based density surface model (DSM) for pelagic false killer whales with support from the NOAA Fisheries National Protected Species Toolbox Initiative. The main objective was to update the DSM framework used to estimate false killer whale abundance in Hawaiʻi and the central North Pacific and produce new density estimates for pelagic false killer whales. This Toolbox project is using open science practices to accomplish three main objectives: (1) reformulation of the current central Pacific/Hawaiʻi DSM structure in R using upgraded spatial functionality and new modeled oceanographic products, (2) integration of new spatially explicit methods for propagating uncertainty of detection parameters and environmental variability, and (3) exploration and integration of new model validation approaches, especially for data limited species. In addition to providing updated abundance estimates for pelagic false killer whales in the central Pacific region (Gardner et al. in press), this Toolbox project also provided a current, open access workflow for density surface modeling of distance sampling-based survey data (Toolbox False Killer Whale DSM) that NOAA Fisheries and other users can use for reproducible cetacean density estimation.
• 2026-2027. False killer whale photo-identification work to support abundance estimation efforts for the endangered main Hawaiian Islands population, undertaken by Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center. Contact Robin Baird (rwbaird (at) cascadiaresearch (dot) org) for more information on this work.

If you are interested in more information on Cascadia Scientific Services, please reach out to Corinne Holland (cholland (at) cascadiaresearch (dot) org)