Logger Project

Pioneered in the 1990’s by Sea Life Surveys, it is now well established that whale watching boats and marine wildlife tour operators can provide very good platforms for collecting useful information about the animals and environment they are working with and watching.

HWDT over the last two years has been working to encourage boat users and tour operators who are regularly out on the water to install this system to increase the amount and quality of data collected by adopting a data collection method called LOGGER.

LOGGER is a cetacean data collection computer program for use onboard vessels. It was developed by International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and is commonly used during cetacean surveys around the world.

The laptop or desktop which runs LOGGER is connected to the ships Global Positioning System (GPS). The GPS data is stored at regular intervals (approx every 20 seconds) in the LOGGER database. This means that there is a constant time stamped record of the ships track. Other information such as cetacean sightings, environmental data, boat heading and speed and acoustic recordings are stored in the same way.

HWDT provides the necessary equipment (e.g. laptops and GPS interface leads) to run the program and also help with initial set up of program, design and maintenance of the database. And collation of data collected. Using this system has many advantages including:

Reduces the amount of time spent manual writing and data inputting
Increased accuracy of data
Real time storage of GPS data means not only is sightings data collected but also effort related data (i.e. how far has been travelled and how long has been spent surveying). This allows more complex and more useful analysis to be carried out. For example relative abundance of animals in an area (i.e no. of animals per km) can be calculated.
More data from a range of different areas can be collected relatively easily.

HWDT would like to thank all those who are involved and contributing to this scheme

LOGGER Project