Chesapeake DolphinWatch, the citizen-science app that lets Bay boaters and shoreline watchers report bottlenose dolphin sightings, is marking its tenth year with more than 20,000 users and over 12,000 logged sightings — and with researchers turning to new tools to answer the one question the app can’t: how many dolphins actually live in the Chesapeake Bay. (Reporting on the program’s milestone was first published by science writer Wendy Mitman Clarke for the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.)
The program was developed by researchers at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory (CBL) in Solomons, in partnership with the Chesapeake Bay Trust, which provided initial grant funding. “I think Helen [Bailey] and I thought it would be a dozen of our closest friends who reported,” said Tom Miller, a CBL fisheries science professor who co-founded the program with Helen Bailey and now leads it. “Now we have really great information on where dolphins are seen in time and space.”
That data has already supported real science: a 2021 peer-reviewed study in PLOS ONE used DolphinWatch sighting reports, cross-checked against...