Beneath the Surface: A Deeper Dive into Our Work on Blue Corridors - Ode Partners

According to IUCN, seven of the world's fourteen great whale species remain endangered or vulnerable. These are animals that have traversed the oceans for millions of years, following ancient migration routes to nest and carry on their species. Human activity on land and in the sea have disrupted those migration corridors, making whales travel through some of the most heavily trafficked, fished, and polluted waters on the planet. 

Many marine biologists, researchers, and institutions have dedicated their lives and existence to helping us understand more about the ocean. Until now, the full picture of whale migratory routes was scattered across dozens of research institutions, locked in individual datasets that had never been brought together. Blue Corridors is working to change that.

Built by Ode in partnership with WWF, the platform brings together satellite-tracking data from more than sixty research groups, spanning thirty-one years, 1,437 individual tags, and more than three million kilometres of whale migration tracks, making it navigable, useful, intelligible, and alive. Users can explore these migration corridors, overlay threat layers, and begin to understand, visually and intuitively, the intersection of whale movement and human impact.

When combining multiple species, each with dozens of individual satellite tracks, their extrapolated corridors, global range maps, and numerous threat datasets, all on a single interactive map, the risk is that it becomes noise: everything competing, nothing communicating.

To combat this, we built out a visual language where each species has its own color system that unifies its tracks, migration corridor, and range data into a coherent family. We rendered satellite tracks as bright lines to communicate distance and direction of travel. The extrapolated migration corridors are shown as polygon layers that wrap around the satellite tracks. Each species range map is a highly detailed raster that visually sits as the bottommost layer in order to let the primary datasets speak loudest. This system allows us to show multiple strata of data simultaneously, while still communicating with a clear voice.

Our species list features highly detailed hand-drawn scientific illustrations of each whale—not icons or silhouettes, but illustrations with character and specificity—to give a recognizable face and silhouette for species that might otherwise remain abstract. On hover, they bob gently in the water, a small animation that is part easter egg, part reminder: these are living creatures. It's a subtle thing, easy to cut from development when the tickets are piling up and the deadline is approaching, but subtlety is often where the most honest design lives.

On the homepage, we invite visitors in with real drone footage of a whale breaching provided by the adventurous WWF Whales and Dolphins team. It's another intentional choice: before we ask anyone to engage with maps of threat data and satellite tracks, we want them to see why they should care; we want them to build a relationship with these majestic living creatures that are worthy and in need of saving.

Our team knew from the very beginning, static data wouldn’t cut it; these are creatures in constant motion navigating dangerous threats. There was a moment early in the project, before the design was finalized, before any of the build had even started, when we ran our first map test: we took every satellite track we had, from every species, and plotted it on a stylized map using mapbox. It allowed us to see the hundreds of individual journeys, arcing and crossing and converging across every ocean basin on Earth. The “data” was no longer abstract. It was immediate. These weren't just lines of GeoJSON. They were living creatures, mid-migration, following corridors they traveled long before we were here to bear witness. Animating the tracks serves as a visual reminder of what the data actually represents.

The data in Blue Corridors comes from dedicated researchers who have spent decades in the field, securing funding year after year, deploying tags in difficult conditions, building the kind of patient, longitudinal record that science requires but rarely rewards quickly. For many of them, this data isn't just a resource, it's THE WORK. It represents their life's effort to understand and ultimately conserve and protect species that most of the world never thinks about. And each track tells the story of an individual whale’s journey, sometimes spanning thousands of kilometres in a single year. 

When WWF and a core group of marine scientists first brought this consortium together to produce a foundational report on blue corridors and whale vulnerability, the spirit was collaborative from the start. When Ode came on board to build the digital platform, we carried that forward. We shared concepts early and brought the researchers into the design process, not as data providers, but as co-creators. We listened when they told us how their data should and shouldn't be represented, and we came back to them as the build evolved.

Attribution came up in nearly every group session, and rightly so. For researchers, proper credit is evidence that their work is being used, which helps make the case for continued funding, so we built it in everywhere: a wall of partner logos on the homepage, a long citation list in the methodology section, using tooltips for individual track attribution inside the tool, and creating a data request pipeline that routes directly back to the original researchers. They stay in control of their raw data while the platform tells the aggregate story.

Sixty research groups. Fifty sets of hard-won knowledge about specific species or regions, brought together into something none of them could have accomplished individually. A sum that is greater than its parts.

Blue Corridors is built for everyone with a stake in the ocean: policymakers who need spatial evidence to inform conservation decisions, shipping companies and fisheries trying to understand where their operations intersect with whale corridors, and journalists or curious members of the public who deserve access to real science without needing a PhD to navigate it.

The tool reveals the truth about where whales go, where the threats are, and where the overlap is most dangerous. All in the hopes of changing human action to better protect marine life.

We hope this is only the beginning. Our ambition for Blue Corridors is to grow: to bring in more species data, better localize the aggregate threats to marine life, and evolve the platform into a targeted decision support tool—one that doesn't just show where whales travel, but clearly identifies where human activity should be reduced or rerouted to minimize its impact on them. From shipping lanes to fishing zones and offshore development, the goal is to give the people making those decisions the spatial evidence they need to make better ones.

For decades, the marine researchers behind the data have been gathering evidence individually, sharing it within the scientific community, making the tireless case to protect our great whales. It is time to open the aperture and welcome decision makers in because when we all are armed with knowledge, and swimming in the same direction, our great whales can do what they do best: