About SalishSea.io

Communities throughout the Salish Sea are working to monitor and protect the diversity of life it supports. This site serves as a portal into their efforts.

We currently show:

• iNaturalist observations of cetaceans, pinnipeds, and otters
• Sightings submitted to the Whale Alert mobile app by the public
• Sightings from the Orca Network community

Data download

The sightings we publish, except iNaturalist's, can be downloaded under CC BY 4.0 as a Darwin Core Archive or a GeoParquet file. SalishSea.io Marine Mammal Occurrences has the files, where they come from, and how to cite them.

What this site records

• What you search for. When you choose a search result, or give up on a search, the site keeps the words you typed, how many results they found, and what you chose. It does not keep who you are or where you searched from.
• Errors and page timings. Your browser reports errors, and how long each page took to load, to Sentry, a service that tells us when the site is broken. These reports include your IP address, your browser, the address of the page and the address of the page that linked to it.
• Requests. Our hosting, Amazon CloudFront, keeps the usual record of each request for 90 days: the address it came from, the page, and the page that linked to it.
• If you sign in with Google, the email address on your account, to tie your sightings to you, and what you send: sightings, photos and feedback.

There are no ads, and nothing here follows you to other sites. The only cookie this site sets keeps you signed in.

A sighting's place, such as "Haro Strait", is the name of the water region it was in, from the water regions of our basemap, which contain information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada and the Open Government Licence – British Columbia.

Submitting a sighting means agreeing to our terms of use. If you have any feedback, use the Feedback button on the map, or email rainhead@gmail.com. This free, open access, site is based on open source code pioneered by Peter Abrahamsen and is funded in 2025-26 by Beam Reach.