The SCOUT initiative - Our ground-level data collection effort

The API Is Live. Here Is Why That Changes Everything.

This month, Whale Guardians formally announced the launch of our routing API - a milestone that marks the moment our work moved from research and advocacy into the operational heartbeat of the global shipping industry. But to understand what the API truly represents, you first need to understand where it comes from. That is the story of SCOUT.

A Strategy Built on Three Pillars

Whale Guardians was founded on a clear and urgent mission: prevent vessel strikes on whales, and enable great whale populations to recover to pre-whaling levels. To achieve that at scale, the organisation operates across three strategic pillars: high-integrity data collection, evidence-based routing recommendations, and industry partnership and certification. Each pillar depends on the others. And SCOUT sits at the foundation of all three.

Pillar One: High-Integrity Data — Why SCOUT Exists

Before a ship captain can make a better decision, someone has to have been in the water first. The SCOUT initiative is our ground-level data collection effort, designed to gather marine mammal positions from vessels travelling established coastal routes. The SCOUT device will be deployed aboard various vessels operating in regions where whale sighting data is scarce, inconsistent, or simply absent. Its purpose is straightforward and vital: put reliable, route-specific, real-world observations into the hands of the people building the maps that captains navigate by.

The urgency behind this work becomes clear when you look at what the broader data landscape actually says. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) - which operates the most extensive global ship strike database in existence - has itself published explicit caveats about the limitations of that data. As the IWC notes in its own reporting, the database must be considered preliminary because it contains "many (large) data gaps," and information shared with stakeholders is "accompanied by important caveats regarding the completeness of the picture." The IWC further acknowledges that collisions with large vessels often go entirely unnoticed and unreported - meaning the true scale of the problem is almost certainly far greater than any database currently reflects.

Academic analysis of the IWC dataset reinforces this concern. Researchers have flagged the problem of biased data: information collected for one purpose being repurposed for another, often because no better alternative exists. This is precisely the kind of data chaff - large volumes of low-value or misapplied information - that distorts our understanding of where whales are, when they are there, and which shipping corridors pose the greatest risk.

SCOUT was designed as a direct response to this gap. Rather than repurposing existing data, we are building new data: route-specific, seasonally contextualised, and collected by practitioners with a stake in getting it right.

So many people working on the ocean are entirely unaware that vessel strikes are the single greatest threat to the world's great whales. Hopefully, the SCOUT device will change this. When placed in the hands of a crew member or captain, ship strike mitigation becomes tangible. We hope that  people will become empowered and  part of the solution.

At WG, we do not believe that the problem is indifference to the problem, but rather a lack of infrastructure for participation.

Pillar Two: Evidence-Based Routing - The API Goes Live

Reliable data is only as powerful as its delivery mechanism. This is where Pillar Two connects directly to SCOUT's progress.

The Whale Guardians routing application now incorporates all known and approved whale routing recommendations - including those from the World Shipping Council, the IMO, the Blue Whales Blue Skies Whale Atlas, local port authorities, and our own Great Whale Conservancy partners. In total, this encompasses 27 sensitive regions and approximately 130 individual recommendations, each clearly sourced, with mandatory or voluntary status specified, and season-specific parameters documented.

Critically, our routing API is now live and actively being tested by our partner Accelleron, who are integrating it into their OptiNav AI voyage optimisation solution. The API feeds routing recommendations - including all relevant metadata - directly into navigational software, enabling ship operators to plan routes that are both efficient and whale-aware. This is the most operationally sound route to impact: not asking the industry to change its tools, but embedding whale safety into the tools they already use.

The whale sightings layer in our app continues to grow, drawing on our own biologists' data as well as API integrations with partners including Whale Alert. As SCOUT expands its geographic footprint - particularly along the African coast and in South America, where routing projects are currently in development - that sightings layer will become richer, more current, and more trustworthy.

This is the feedback loop that makes the three-pillar strategy coherent: SCOUT generates the observations that fill the data gaps the IWC has identified. Those observations populate the routing app. The API puts those recommendations inside the systems captains actually use.

Pillar Three: Industry Partnership - The League and the Certification

No data strategy survives without the people willing to act on it.

The third pillar of the Whale Guardians strategy is the League itself - a growing community of certified ship owners, port operators, conservation partners, and maritime practitioners committed to making whale-safe routing a standard professional practice.

What SCOUT has demonstrated on the ground is that this community exists and is ready to grow. The challenge is not convincing the maritime industry that whales matter. The challenge is giving professionals the tools and the framing to see themselves as part of the solution. The SCOUT device - physical, deployable, and immediately understandable - has proven to be one of the most effective instruments we have for bridging that gap.

As the API matures and new routing projects launch in Africa and South America, the League will have more to offer its members: retroactive fleet analysis, proactive seasonal route recommendations, and direct integration pathways for navigational software. Each new member strengthens the data network that SCOUT is building.

What Comes Next

The API launch is a beginning, not a destination. Whale Guardians will be actively seeking:

• Shipping industry partners to integrate the routing API into voyage optimisation software

• Marine biologists and conservationists able to share whale sighting data in regions not yet covered

• Funding partners to support continued development of the app and SCOUT's field operations

  
  

The great whales have survived millennia. With better data, better tools, and a growing league of people willing to use them, we intend to make sure they survive this century too.