looks like NOAA created an app to report marine mammals in trouble. so there must be some underlying inftrastructure that could receive these kinds of electronic reports on the NOAA end and then distribute that infromation to whoever needs to know.
i bet if someone was really interested in a doing a small coding project, they could set up something that would monitor iNaturalist observations as they come in, maybe run them through some sort of very basic AI to look for signs of death or distress, and then, as appropriate, send these through to NOAA, while maybe then noting that in a comment in iNaturalist. (the comment might technically run afoul of iNat’s prohibition of machine generated content, but i don’t think anyone would look askance at that kind of use.)
then that code / setup could be given to NOAA, and maybe they could take it over internally. (or more likely, they would probably have talked to NOAA in advance to figure out the underlying architecture of the electronic reporting, and maybe that could have spurred an effort within NOAA to do this on their own or provide resources to facilitate an outside developer to do the coding work but ultimately get it in NOAA hands.)