Whale Photo ID Application - Andy Townsend Design

The Southern Right whale (SRW) is now listed as an endangered species. While a number of significant SRW datasets spanning decades have been collected by people to help manage this species, these remained largely inaccessible to other researchers and managers and to the wider scientific community.

As an initiative of the right whale research and management community, our brief was to develop a centralised, online repository for data about individually identified southern right whales.

In a year-long project, in collaboration with Skadia P/L and working with stakeholders across scientific and industry bodies, we created an innovative and professional web application called the Australasian Right Whale Photo-Identification Catalogue (ARWPIC). The developed system provides access to comprehensive whale sighting histories and a way to match individual whale identifications. Because all the information is now in one place, stakeholders are able to use all the information easily.

In a world-first for the SRW community the feedback from researchers, managers and the funding body has been overwhelmingly positive. The application has attracted international interest, with researchers from South America and South Africa interested in contributing to the catalogue.

Things we did

Design
Development
Image Editing
Testing
Quality Assurance
Project Management

What do these terms mean? See the glossary.

Launch Website