As an inspiration and direct result from the discussions at the February Orca Symposium in Tarifa Spain, I have developed a set of checklists and practical protocols, which will be helpful to mariners intending to pass through orcas zones and orca attack hotspots. The 19-page document can be downloaded here. Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.
Here is the revised PDF version of the paper, which was presented at ITDRR 2024, the 9th IFIP WG5.15 Conference on Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction, held at Krems, Austria from Oct 14, 2024 to Oct 16, 2024.
Citation: Scholl, Hans J. (2024, Oct 14-16), “The Iberian Orca Interaction Crisis: Disentangling Wild Marine and Human Lives—A Call for Managed Co-existence” Paper presented at the 9th IFIP WG5.15 Conference on Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction, held at Krems, Austria. https://faculty.waschington.edu/jscholl/itdrr2024/Scholl_2024b.pdf
Orca-related research appears to attract an increasing number of academic disciplines beyond marine biology, wildlife behavioral studies, and conservation. Most empirical research in the subject area involves all kind of advanced sensory, measuring, observational, and information technologies. Other scholars here come from as distant fields as linguistics, genetics, and history among others. My own participation, which emphasizes the perspectives of emergency management and information management, is only another case in point. Learning from these different academic perspectives is fascinating to me.
For showing accepted posters (see below) the organizers chose a historical spot (a building, which had served for a long time as a Christian Church once converted from an Islamic Mosque, which in turn was built on a large Roman foundation adjacent to a Medieval Fortress).
For four years, encounters between orcas and recreational sailors have not been very happy ones (for the recreational sailors) in the Strait of Gibraltar and around the Atlantic shores of the Iberian peninsula. So far, no human lives have been lost; however, a total of six sailboats were sunk as a result of orcas attacking and damaging the rudders of sailboats. Over 500 such encounters have been reported since, and some five dozen sailboats have been badly damaged.
In response to these incidents, recreational sailboaters have organized a self-help group (orcas.pt) that provides warnings, location data of sightings and incidents, along with advice and guidelines to sailboat skippers and crews. At the Orca Symposium to be held in mid-February of 2025 in Tarifa, Spain, the poster below will be presented, which calls for an integrated and collaborative approach to creating and maintaining situational awareness and a common operating picture that helps prevent potential human-orca interaction.
To achieve this, the information available from all stakeholders, that is, marine biologists, marine conservationists, fishermen, whale watchers, sailboaters, Coast Guard, Spanish, Portuguese, and Moroccan government agencies, needs to be collected and integrated in near-real time.
So far, it is not clear what initially caused and still motivates the orcas’ behavior; nor is it clear whether or not this pattern of behavior will cede any time soon. The poster below (to be shown at the February symposium) details some aspects of the problem from the recreational sailors’ self-help perspective.
The Magic 20K Barrier has been Crossed: Now Listing 20,483 References of Peer-reviewed Research Articles in the English Language
Version 20.5 of the Digital Government Reference Library (DGRL) has been published as of December 18, 2024. The library now contains 20,483 references of predominantly English-language, peer-reviewed work in the study domains of digital government, digital governance, and digital democracy.
This marks a 2.8% increase in references from version 20.0 (June of 2024) and a 5.6% increase from version 19.5 (December of 2023). This past publication period has continued to be another good one for Digital Government-related publishing adding another 4-digit number (1,093) of new peer-reviewed academic references within the past 12 months.
Curation of the DGRL has been provided for two decades by teams at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA/USA under the guidance of Prof. Hans J. Scholl. Version 20.5 (this version) is the first, which marks the transition of the DGRL to its new home at the Center for E-Governance (CEG) at the University of Continued Education (Danube University), Krems, Austria. The curation at CEG will be guided by Associate Professor Gabriela Viale Pereira and her team. Version 21.0 (slated for June 15, 2025) will be hosted at CEG, Krems, Austria.
The DGRL has been strengthening its role as an indispensable tool for Digital Government scholars. In particular, reviewers of paper submissions are reported to rely heavily on this reference library.
Packaged in a zip file, bibTeX, RIS, and Endnote (package) versions are available. Mendeley or Zotero versions can easily be created by importing from RIS or bibTeX files. Please get back to us in case of any errors or omissions. Thank you for your interest and cooperation.
Acknowledgement: No curator can do the work alone. Under the curator and editorship of Hans J. Scholl, the DGRL has been maintained and expanded over two decades with the help of teams led by Jan Boyd and Galen Guffy and graduate student team members Colin Anderson, Andrea Berg, Emily Cunningham, Erika Deal, Gary Gao, Leslie Harka, Kreg Hasegawa, Jackie Holmes, Julia Hon, Grace Landers, Christine Lee, Andrew Mckenna-Foster, Jessie Novotny, Marie Peeples, Hannah Robinson, Richard Robohm, Kelle Rose, Stephanie Rossi, Christopher Setzer, and Daniel Wilson. Andrea Chapman at the Center for E-Governance, Krems, Austria, has been instrumental in preparing the current version.
Citation: Scholl, H. J. (2024). The Digital Government Reference Library (DGRL). Versions 20.0—20.5. Retrieved from http://faculty.washington.edu/jscholl/dgrl/