The critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale resides in waters with busy shipping lanes in the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where incidents of ship strikes have proven to be a primary cause of whale death, resulting in their numbers dwindling to less than 400. Though the implementation of speed limits for ships has been somewhat successful in reducing mortality should a collision occur, a lack of knowledge as to the whereabouts of the whales has prevented ships from being able to avoid collisions entirely.

This project will use a drone to map aquatic habitat in Carnation Creek. Research better characterizing fish habitat is critical given the declines seen in many coastal fish stocks. Traditional methods of surveying aquatic habitat are often physically demanding and limited to short channel segments. However, advances in fish ecology suggest that better management of fish species require research that links basin scale patterns in channel morphology to aquatic habitat; which is the scale fish complete their life histories.

Understanding river water quality is critical for various purposes such as ensuring drinking water safety, protecting public health and aquatic habitat, monitoring pollution, and disease control. The traditional approach to investigating water quality is by acquiring water samples at fixed-locations, which is time and cost consuming and cannot discover spatial distribution of water quality over a large area. The goal of this proposal is using remote sensing imagery to provide a complementary method to map and monitor water quality in large areas at real time.