Dalhousie University's Ocean Tracking Network secures $38.5M grant to expand research

A Halifax-based aquatic research network that gathers information from the depths of the ocean using gliders and marine animals has secured an additional $38.5 million in funding, allowing them to expand their work for years to come.

The Ocean Tracking Network (OTN) started at Dalhousie University in 2008. It builds and deploys Canadian-designed acoustic receivers and oceanographic monitoring equipment around the world.

Its sensors track the movement of more than 100 at-risk and commercially important species, including North Atlantic right whales and Atlantic bluefin tuna.

Sara Iverson, the scientific director at OTN, said this funding is a "huge deal" in understanding marine animal populations that are vital to healthy ecosystems, food security and socioeconomic benefits.

"There's a continued and accelerating over-exploitation of them and we need to understand their movements, their survival, their distribution, in order to effectively manage them and sustain them," she told CBC Radio's Mainstreet on Friday.

"And so OTN's mission is to be a global leader in supporting the research that enables this understanding and stewardship."

The money, granted by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, brings the network's funding to $65.6 million for its 2017-2029 cycle.

A news release from Dalhousie University said the funding will allow the network to grow its headquarters, infrastructure and operations, bolster its database by creating new partnerships around the world, develop new technologies to better understand the ocean, and support the United Nation's sustainable development goals.

It will also allow the network to continue the work they're already doing — tracking and understanding marine life.

"Right now, it's being used to track critically endangered North Atlantic right whales to mitigate, in real-time, shipping strikes and entanglement in fishing gears," she said.

Fred Whoriskey, the executive director of OTN, said it's pertinent to track marine animals like Atlantic bluefin tuna and North Atlantic right whales because they're highly valued species.

"They're either fisheries — or in some cases tourism — drivers and what happens is local communities and Indigenous peoples are really dependent on them, so when things begin to go wrong, things begin to change. It has real impacts on our communities," he said. 

"The work that we're doing is really trying to make a better future here for Canada and for Canadians and to try to support our local communities."