Erin Falcone
In the Active Voice: Beaked Whales and Underwater Sonar on a Busy Navy Training Range in California
About the Speaker
Erin Falcone is a biologist with Marine Ecology & Telemetry Research (www.MarEcoTel.org), a small non-profit organization based in Seabeck, WA with a mission of conservation-driven marine mammal research and developing tools and techniques to support it. She began her career working with humpbacks at the remote Revillagigedo Archipelago off the coast of Mexico in the late 90's, while attending Humboldt State University in northern California. In the decades since, she has worked with species from harbor porpoise to blue whales at locations from Costa Rica to Dutch Harbor. Her specialties are cetacean photo-ID, data management, and small-vessel based research, including tagging. Much of her recent work addresses the impacts of military operations, including mid-frequency active sonar use and explosives, on cetacean populations at the US Navy's Southern California Offshore Range. She and her partner, Greg Schorr, founded MarEcoTel in 2016, the same year their son Sebastian was born. When not way offshore in a rigid-hull inflatable or building databases, she can be found riding her horse along the forested shores of Hood Canal.