The public face of Scotland's marine animal stranding scheme

The scheme

The Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme is the dedicated research and reporting scheme for stranded cetaceans, pinnipeds, marine turtles, and large sharks in Scotland. Members of the public report strandings, and the scheme’s team turns those reports into a long-running scientific record.

What we built

The scheme’s public website: how to report a stranding, published reports, and information for the people who help.

The centrepiece is a custom plugin that displays the scheme’s stranding map on the site, linked directly to its database. The map and the data behind it were developed by the scheme’s own team. Our job was to make them work on the public website, so a visitor sees current records without anyone copying data across by hand.

The outcome

A public website that puts the scheme’s data in front of the people who need it, and that its team can keep running themselves.