I spent a significant part of 2025 on the southern Australian coastline watching for whales. Not casually. Systematically. Structured observation sessions, consistent protocols, documented effort.  

The Otway Basin is a designated Biologically Important Area for Southern Right Whales, which are listed as Endangered under Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act). Our goal was to build a credible baseline dataset to better understand whale presence and coastal use in the region during the winter reproduction season.  For coastal monitoring programs, understanding where and when whales are present is essential for designing appropriate environmental management measures. 

As Environmental Consultant Rachel Hurley, involved in the monitoring program, also noted: 

“For a population listed as Endangered under the EPBC Act, improving the consistency of monitoring is critical. Reliable observation and monitoring methods help us better understand where whales are using the coastline and whether those patterns change over time.” 

What I came away with wasn’t just data. It was a much clearer understanding of what shore-based monitoring can and can’t do, and why the gap between those two things matters.  

Pictured: Evan O’Reilly, Chief Remote Pilot; Rachel Hurley, Environmental Consultant; and Caoimhe Tweedy, Senior Environmental Consultant 

What the Season Revealed 

We completed 110 observation sessions across the season. 275 hours of documented field effort. Confirmed whale presence in the area throughout. 

What struck me wasn’t any single number. It was the cumulative weight of the conditions. Swell patterns that swallow a blow at anything beyond a few hundred metres. The geometry of scanning horizontally across a curved, constantly moving surface. Low winter light creating glare across the water at exactly the hours when whales are most active near shore. 

The conditions that make this coastline extraordinary to be in are precisely what make it hard to monitor from land. 

The Question That Followed 

After that season, the question I kept coming back to wasn’t how to do shore-based monitoring better. It was whether there was a fundamentally different way to approach the problem. 

What if you removed the horizontal line of sight entirely? 

Altitude changes everything about the observation geometry. Looking down through the water column from above, the swell that obscures a blow from shore becomes largely irrelevant. Glare affects a horizontal observer, but it doesn’t affect a sensor looking straight down. Many of the observational constraints of a difficult coastline simply disappear when viewed from above. 

Thermal imaging adds another dimension. A whale at the surface produces an unmistakable heat signature against cold water, detectable regardless of light conditions, at dawn, at dusk, and at night. Species that are largely nocturnal and have historically been almost impossible to survey systematically, Little Penguins for instance, become observable in conditions that were simply closed to conventional methods. 

A drone carrying both thermal and high-resolution RGB sensors, flying systematic transects beyond visual line of sight, can cover a coastal survey area in a fraction of the time a shore rotation takes. Every pass produces geo-referenced, time-stamped data. The platform doesn’t fatigue. It performs the same way on a grey August morning as it does on a clear October afternoon, and that consistency is what makes a dataset genuinely useful over time. 

“Environmental monitoring is only as valuable as the dataset it builds” 

A baseline produced under highly variable observational conditions, where what you detect depends heavily on the weather, the light, the sea state, and the observer on any given day, has real limits when you try to draw conclusions from it across time. 

The value of a more consistent survey platform isn’t just that it detects more. It’s that it detects in a way that’s comparable from one session to the next, one season to the next. That comparability is what turns monitoring into a genuine long-term record, the kind that can tell you whether a population is stable, whether habitat use is shifting, whether conditions are changing. 

What I’m Working Towards 

One season of shore-based observation gave me a clear picture of the problem. The next step is deploying the technology to address it properly. 

I’ll be sharing more about what that looks like and what we’re building at Klarite in the weeks ahead. 

Contact me for more: eoreilly@klarite.com.au. 

Evan O’Reilly, Chief Remote Pilot  

Evan O’Reilly is Chief Remote Pilot at Klarite, leading the integration of remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) into offshore environmental monitoring programs. With a Bachelor of Earth Science and experience in environmental sampling, compliance monitoring, and impact assessment, he combines practical field expertise with advanced spatial analysis to support defensible environmental decision-making. Evan holds a Remote Pilot Licence (RePL), Aeronautical Radio Operator Certificate (AROC), and serves as Klarite’s Chief Remote Pilot (CRP), progressing advanced operational capability including Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) flight operations. Originally from Ireland, he relocated to Australia to pursue opportunities in the environmental sector and focuses on applying emerging technologies to strengthen marine monitoring and data quality in complex offshore environments.