Individual North Atlantic right whales identified from space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The population of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, Eubalaena glacialis , numbers approximately 336 individuals, and continues to decline. Current development and implementation of protection measures and monitoring of right whale presence relies on visual surveys from vessel and aerial platforms, and passive acoustic monitoring, which contribute to location data. Here we demonstrate that satellite imagery can be used to detect and confirm the North Atlantic right whales at a species level using newly available imaging methods, providing another tool to inform conservation efforts. Using optical satellite imagery with 15 cm resolution, 25 right whales were observed in Cape Cod Bay on April 24, 2021. Species confirmation was possible due to clearly visible callosity patterns indicative of their species within this range. Although the variations in callosity patterns commonly used to identify individuals were too small to be resolved at this image resolution, one whale with large distinctive markings visible on his body was identified at an individual level from satellite imagery alone. Although visual and acoustic survey methods can be combined for monitoring this species in critical habitats, satellite‐based monitoring can be especially helpful to understand whale presence outside the areas monitored with existing visual and acoustic detection methods.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.045 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".