New funding is set to help expand South Coast Natural Resource Management’s southern right whale tracking project, putting more citizen scientists on the ground to catalogue the endangered whales.

Southern right whales began returning to the waters off the Great Southern coast last month.

This season the project is expanding its survey area as it engages volunteer citizen scientists and local Indigenous rangers to catalogue the whale’s migration along the coast.

The project is a collaborative effort between research and conservation organisations including South Coast NRM, South Coast Cetaceans, Oceans Blueprint and Edith Cowan University, and previously covered the coastline between Albany and Hopetoun.

However, thanks to additional funding from Water Corporation, it will now broaden its horizons to stretch between Denmark in the west and Cape Arid in the east.

Volunteers and rangers are trained by scientists in how to spot, photograph and survey southern rights in the water, and their findings are sent back to university researchers.

Project co-ordinator Laura Bird said expanding the project’s geographic scope would generate more data over a larger area, giving researchers a clearer picture of the whales’ lives. It would also allow more people to get involved in the project.

“Expanding the right whale tracker project means more comprehensive data on southern right whales; an endangered species,” she said.

“This additional information will help researchers better understand their migration routes, aggregation areas and calving grounds — insights that can, in turn, inform decisions around sustainable coastal development.

“The program is also training more Indigenous ranger teams to conduct surveys across this expanded area, creating further opportunities to integrate First Nations cultural knowledge into the project and increasing overall survey coverage.

“We are also developing training videos alongside our in-person training workshops to enable community members in more remote areas of our region to get involved in the project.”

Since the project started in 2024, 36 volunteers and 31 Indigenous rangers logged more than 587 hours conducting 226 surveys, culminating in 41 new individual southern right whales being identified by scientists.

“As more trained observers join the effort, we gather more data and build a clearer picture of which areas matter most to southern right whales along our south coast,” Ms Bird said.

“It also raises awareness of how we can reduce threats to these gentle giants, encouraging them to keep returning to breed here and supporting the long-term growth of their numbers.”