Empowering the community to contribute to marine science

I am passionate advocate for working together to protect and conserve our oceans - this work cannot be done alone. We all have valuable skills and experiences that each add unique pieces of the puzzle, to together better understand our seas and how we can help them. 

Over the course of my research career, I've aimed to work alongside others to ensure knowledge gathered about our seas is utilised! This has included working with wildlife drone pilots to publish their unique footage in the scientific literature which captured a number of fascinating events that bettered our understanding of marine mammals, digitising and mapping out valuable public sightings data of marine mammals to empower the community to use it to demonstrate how valuable their local area is for those species, and training up a whole network of citizen scientists to contribute data to the Scottish Vessel Project. In 2023, the project won the 'Principal's Research Impact and Engagement Award - Involve' award, which recognises outstanding achievement in public engagement with research, and the active involvement of communities outwith academia to develop and deliver research together - highlighting that together, we can do great things!

Conserving our oceans 'On the Litter Trail'

After feeling disheartened about the volume of litter on some of Scotland's most remote beaches, I was motivated to take action to illustrate how relatively small actions can quickly add up to have large impactful consequences - especially when we work together. So, in 2020, via my online platform On the Killer Whale Trail I led the 'On the Litter Trail' campaign, funded by Sea-Changers. The goal of the 2-week campaign was to do one or more litter picks a day, then weigh the litter, and relate the weight of the litter to the weight of a marine species (for example, one day we collected the weight of a harbour porpoise!). This was accompanied by a social media campaign and development of accompanying outreach materials throughout the 2-weeks, which galvanised action across the globe. Contributors were cleaning up their own areas and sending in their photos and collected litter weights to add to the running total. By the end of the campaign, the message had spread globally (we even had a beach clean on Vancouver Island!), Sea Wolf Rum had donated gifts to award to the top litter pickers, we cleaned litter from some of Scotland's most remote beaches and nature reserves, and we had collectively collected a whopping 1.1 tonnes of litter, the equivalent of three Risso's dolphins or 16 harbour porpoise, or 370 gannets!