GAIA Marine delivered a full marine fauna monitoring and mitigation program for an offshore geophysical survey in Victoria, providing trained Marine Mammal Observers, HD/IR surveillance, regulatory-aligned procedures, real-time mitigation advice and final reporting to support compliant offshore survey operations.
GAIA Marine developed and implemented a site-specific marine fauna observation procedure for offshore geophysical survey activities, aligned with project referral requirements and EPBC Act guidance. The monitoring program used dedicated Marine Mammal Observers across continuous 12-hour shift coverage, supported by high-definition and long-wave infrared camera systems, night-vision binoculars, DSLR cameras, binoculars, handheld GPS, VHF communications and structured reporting tools. The procedure defined observation and shutdown zones around acoustic sources, escalation pathways, communication roles and mitigation actions for pre-start, soft-start, full-power survey, line turns, dynamic positioning and vessel transit.
The field program ran from late October to mid-December 2024 during offshore geophysical survey operations. GAIA maintained MMO observation coverage across mitigated and non-mitigated survey activities, including testing, transit, pre-start-up, soft-start, dynamic positioning and full-power operations. The team recorded 112 marine mammal sightings, including humpback whales, dolphins, seals and unidentified cetaceans, and advised 10 shutdown mitigation actions where required. The program achieved zero MMO sighting-effort downtime, zero equipment downtime, zero personnel incidents and no marine mammal incidents.
This project demonstrates GAIA Marine’s ability to deliver more than personnel supply. GAIA combined offshore MMO capability with practical survey-team integration, real-time communication, HD/IR monitoring, procedural control, QA/QC and data engineering. Final outputs included compliance reporting, species distribution summaries, mitigation-action records, operational timelines, weather summaries and an interactive HTML mapping deliverable that allowed the client to interrogate sightings, vessel tracks and observation data spatially. This is the type of integrated monitoring and reporting workflow that supports compliant offshore survey execution while giving project teams a defensible record of environmental performance.