A Virtual Dragnet: Using Satellites To Combat Illegal Overfishing
January 31st, 2015
Via The Economist, a report on a new satellite-based surveillance system keeping a close eye on illegal overfishing:
THE Yongding is something of a ghost ship, disappearing and changing her name many times, along with her flag of registration. The 62-metre vessel was last spotted on January 13th in a marine conservation area in the Southern Ocean, blatantly hauling up outlawed gill nets laden with toothfish, a catch so prized that it is known as “white gold”. Interpol is seeking information about who operates the ship and profits from its activities, as well as those of two accompanying vessels, Kunlun (pictured above, landing a toothfish) and Songhua. In the vastness of the open ocean, policing vessels like Yongding, Kunlun and Songhua is hard. But it is about to get easier—for with just a few mouse clicks a satellite-based monitoring system, unveiled this week, will be able to compile a dossier of evidence about even the most clandestine fishing operations.
The scale of illegal and unreported fishing is, for obvious reasons, difficult to estimate. The Pew Charitable Trusts, an American research group, has nevertheless had a stab at it. It reckons that around one fish in five sold in restaurants or shops has been caught outside the law. That may amount to 26m tonnes of them every year, worth more than $23 billion. This illegal trade, though not the only cause of overfishing, is an important one. Stamping it out would help those countries whose resources are being stolen. It would also help to conserve fish stocks, some of which are threatened with extinction. It might even (if the more apocalyptic claims of some ecologists are well founded) slow down the journey towards a wider extinction crisis in the oceans.
The new monitoring system has been developed by the Satellite Applications Catapult, a British government-backed innovation centre based at Harwell, near Oxford, in collaboration with Pew. In essence, it is a big-data project, pulling together and cross-checking information on tens of thousands of fishing boats operating around the world. At its heart is what its developers call a virtual watch room, which resembles the control centre for a space mission. A giant video wall displays a map of the world, showing clusters of lighted dots, each representing a fishing boat.The data used to draw this map come from various sources, the most important of which are ships’ automatic identification systems (AIS). These are like the transponders carried by aircraft. They broadcast a vessel’s identity, position and other information to nearby ships and coastal stations, and also to satellites. An AIS is mandatory for all commercial vessels, fishing boats included, with a gross tonnage of more than 300. Such boats are also required, in many cases, to carry a second device, known as a VMS (vessel monitoring system). This transmits similar data directly to the authorities who control the waters in which the vessel is fishing, and carrying it is a condition of a boat’s licence to fish there. Enforcement of the AIS regime is patchy, and captains do sometimes have what they feel is a legitimate reason for turning it off, in order not to alert other boats in the area to profitable shoals. But the VMS transmits only to officialdom, so there can be no excuse for disabling it. Switching off either system will alert the watch room to potential shenanigans.
The watch room first filters vessels it believes are fishing from others that are not. It does this by looking at, for example, which boats are in areas where fish congregate. It then tracks these boats using a series of algorithms that trigger an alert if, say, a vessel enters a marine conservation area and slows to fishing speed, or goes “dark” by turning off its identification systems. Operators can then zoom in on the vessel and request further information to find out what is going on. Satellites armed with synthetic-aperture radar can detect a vessel’s position regardless of weather conditions. This means that even if a ship has gone dark, its fishing pattern can be logged. Zigzagging, for example, suggests it is long-lining for tuna. When the weather is set fair, this radar information can be supplemented by high-resolution satellite photographs. Such images mean, for instance, that what purports to be a merchant ship can be fingered as a transshipment vessel by watching fishing boats transfer their illicit catch to it.
As powerful as the watch room is, though, its success will depend on governments, fishing authorities and industry adopting the technology and working together, says Commander Tony Long, a 27-year veteran of the Royal Navy who is the director of Pew’s illegal-fishing project. Those authorities need to make sure AIS and VMS systems are not just fitted, but are used correctly and not tampered with. This should get easier as the cost of the technology falls.
Enforcing the use of an identification number that stays with a ship throughout its life, even if it changes hands or country of registration, is also necessary. An exemption for fishing boats ended in 2013, but the numbering is still not universally applied. Signatories to a treaty agreed in 2009, to make ports exert stricter controls on foreign-flagged fishing vessels, also need to act. Fishermen seek out ports with lax regulations to land illegal catches.
Preserving Nature’s bounty
One of the most promising ideas for using the watch room is that shops could employ its findings to protect their supply chains, and thus their reputations for not handling what are, in effect, stolen goods. Governments sometimes have reason to drag their feet about enforcing fisheries rules. Supermarkets, though, will generally want to be seen as playing by them. The watch room’s developers say they are already in discussions with a large European supermarket group to do just this.
The watch room will also allow the effective monitoring of marine reserves around small island states that do not have the resources to do it for themselves. The first test of this approach could be to regulate a reserve of 836,000 square kilometres around the Pitcairn Islands group, a British territory in the middle of the South Pacific with only a few dozen inhabitants.
The Pitcairn reserve, which may be set up later this year, will be one of the world’s largest marine sanctuaries. By proving that the watch room can keep an eye on such a remote site, its developers hope other places with similar requirements will be encouraged to get involved.
The watch-room system is, moreover, capable of enlargement as new information sources are developed. One such may be nanosats. These are satellites, a few centimetres across, that can be launched in swarms to increase the number of electronic eyes in the sky while simultaneously reducing costs. Closer to the surface, unmanned drones can do the same. The watch room, then, is a work in progress. But in the game of cat and mouse that enforcing fishing regulations has become, it will give the cat an important advantage.
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Read More »Aerial Ecology: Drones Collect Environmental DNA (eDNA)
January 21st, 2015
Via MIT’s , an interesting report on the use of drones to advance ecological studies:
Drones carrying cameras or infrared sensors have already found favor with farmers, police forces, and extreme sports enthusiasts. Now engineers are testing versions of the tiny craft that can do more than just observe.
Prototypes able to swoop down to scoop up water samples are being developed to help ecologists, the oil industry, and others track oil leaks or invasive species. Some can even perform rudimentary analysis on the water they collect.
Commercial drone company PrecisionHawk, of Raleigh, North Carolina, is testing a water sampling drone with some clients in the oil industry. It takes the form of a seaplane and has a pump mounted on its pontoons that can handle even viscous swampwater thick with bugs, mud, or algae. The water is sucked into a container and then carried to a lab to check for signs of oil leaks or spills. (See a short video of the drone in action.)
“If you go up to Northern Canada or Alaska, there are literally thousands of ponds and lakes that are a few acres in size,” says PrecisionHawk CEO Ernest Earon. “Trying to walk through or take a boat to get water samples, it’s an almost impossible task.”
Earon says his team is now researching the possibility of a drone carrying a small spectrometer to analyze water for itself. That would save on energy-draining trips back to the lab.
YangQuan Chen, an engineering professor at the University of California, Merced, is testing a quadcopter drone with a buoyant frame that lands on water to collect a sample to be whisked to back to a lab for DNA extraction and sequencing.
The goal is to collect what is called environmental DNA, or eDNA, left behind by plants, animals, or other organisms. Analyzing eDNA provides a way to track diseases and endangered or invasive species. The technique is used to track populations of invasive Asian Carp around the Great Lakes, for example. Grabbing water samples by drone could make the approach more powerful by covering larger areas, says Chen. “There are some places that cannot be reached by boat or vehicle,” says Chen. “You simply cannot go there, so you have to use a drone.”
Chen says his biggest challenge has been to work out a way for the drone to land on moving water or during inclement weather. An onboard sensor registers wind gusts and software adjusts thrust in turn. The drone can scoop up water, but the researchers have not sequenced eDNA in the samples it collected.
In the long term, miniaturization of high-throughput genetic sequencing devices could allow drones to analyze their own samples, says geneticist Mike Miller of the University of California, Davis, who is collaborating with Chen. “Maybe in not that long, there’ll be drones deployed all over California, dipping down into water, sequencing all of the DNA on the fly and sending the data back to a central location,” Miller says.
Carrick Detweiler, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is working on a similar drone he calls a “Co-Aerial Ecologist.” It uses a one-meter dangling tube to suck water onboard like a straw. With water stored in onboard vials, it can then measure the samples’ temperature or conductivity (a proxy for salinity).
At a popular recreation area in Nebraska, Detweiler’s drone has already sampled from a series of small manmade lakes for toxic algae. The task routinely takes a crew of humans 12 to 14 hours, but the drone can do it in about two. The drone has also been used to search Nebraska waterways for the larvae of the invasive zebra mussel.
Detweiler predicts that there will soon be many more hands-on drones appearing. “The next generation of vehicles five to 10 years from now will be capable of getting really close to the environment, like water-sampling or collecting leaf samples,” he says. Detweiler has begun work on a drone that plucks leaves from crops with a mechanical arm, to determine the health of plants, or identify the exact variety of a weed infesting a corn field.
Chen hopes that drones like these could become cheap enough for just about anybody to use. PrecisionHawk’s seaplane drone costs $16,500 even without water sampling gear, which is scheduled to be available as an optional extra later this year. That’s cheap for oil companies but too expensive for many environmental organizations or scientists.
Chen believes that his design could lead to a water sampling drone that costs only $1,000. He envisions ecologists and even journalists being able to routinely sample bodies of water for analysis at the lab, providing a new layer of environmental oversight. “We need to make it affordable,” he says.
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Read More »Drone Conservation Mapping In Namibia
January 10th, 2015
Via Drone Adventures, a look at some of the variety of uses for drone mapping in conservation:
There is much talk on how to use drone mapping technology for nature conservation. However, projects with applicable results for both conservation land use management as well as wildlife conservation, such as animal counts, are few and far between. This past May, Drone Adventures teamed up with Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve, as well as the Polytechnic of Namibia to carry out a two-week mapping mission to explore the variety of uses that drone mapping can offer nature conservation.
Nature conservation in Namibia
The nature conservation field is known to make use of new technologies to support the hard and continuous efforts that are made worldwide by researchers, local communities, governments and hundreds of NGO’s on a daily basis to conserve the many natural wonders and animal species that try to co-habit with the ever growing human population. Namibia is on the forefront of nature conservation, and not only the government but also a large number of private landowners and local communities in conjunction with tourism companies dedicate vast efforts to conserve the semi-arid savannas and desert environments that make up 90% of the country’s surface.
Trans- and interdisciplinary research initiative
Our mission was part of a trans- and interdisciplinary research initiative led by Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve in conjunction with the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Lausanne (EPFL) and the Polytechnic of Namibia. Our part of this initiative was to acquire imagery with light-weight drones and various cameras, including multi-spectral cameras, to produce up-to-date, high-resolution maps and models for data analysis. In line with Drone Adventures’ spirit, the initiative’s goal was to share the resulting maps and models as well as the knowledge on hard- and software use with all involved parties and the local community. In view of the vast mapping mission that lay before us and the many questions our research partners wanted to answer with their in-depth analysis, two Drone Adventures teams relayed each other, each on Namibian ground for a week, to fly our drones and process the thousands of images acquired…
Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve
Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve is a local reserve managed by private landowners. Dr. Friedrich Reinhard, co-manager of the reserve as well as leader of the research initiative hosted the Drone Adventures team for 8 days on his 10’000 ha reserve with a long list of areas to map in hand. His mapping needs for Kuzikus included:
– Animal counts using drone technology
– Drone mapping for sustainable land management and land health assessment
Sharing knowledge at Polytechnic of Namibia
Namibia’s universities, such as the Polytechnic School of Namibia or UNAM (University of Namibia) prepare the engineers, researchers and tourism professionals of tomorrow to address the many challenges of nature conservation to preserve the country’s unique landscapes and wildlife all the while using these resources to support the local economy through responsible tourism and farming. At their request, after hearing about the initiative led on Kuzikus, we led a half-day workshop bringing together engineers, professors, students, researchers and government specialists. The goal of this workshop was to introduce the basics of drone mapping technology and our first experiences made on Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve the prior days. In addition to sharing our knowledge on hard- and software as well as our various mapping experiences, the excitement and interest of the workshop reached its peak during the flight demonstration that proved how easy and accessible drone mapping technology has become.
Drone mapping at Gobabeb Research & Training Center in the Namib desert
The Gobabeb Research and Training Centre is an internationally recognized center for dry land training and research, located in the Namib Desert. Gobabeb’s mission is to be a catalyst for gathering, disseminating and implementing understanding of arid environments. With many specialized research projects, Gobabeb was the perfect place to add another dimension to our Namibian mission: testing how drones and photogrammetry software can handle the difficult environment of one of the driest deserts on earth all the while producing meaningful results. We spent 2 days at Gobabeb. The first day was used for providing geo-referenced orthomosaics and 3D models for an ongoing research project on the endemic !Nara plant, distributed over long corridors in the dune valleys. A total of 3 flights over the valley, with both RGB and RE (Red Edge) cameras provided a 5km long, 500 meter wide corridor map with enough detail to easily geo-locate and assess the !Nara plants. Very much like just some days before in Windhoek, the second day was used to host a workshop for the researchers of Gobabeb, introducing the elements of drone mapping to them and sharing discussions on how this technology can help their research projects.
First answer, more questions
While this first nature conservation mission was able to test the use of drones for nature conservation purposes, the initial results lead to many more questions. During this mission, many additional possibilities of use have been determined, not only on Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve but also at the Gobabeb Research & Training Center. The possibility of using NIR and multi-spectral sensors to compliment terrestrial research for rare plant species such as the Welwitschia or !Nara plants endemic to the Namib desert, offers not only additional research possibilities but also more efficient surveying of larger areas that are difficult to access on foot or car.
Our goal is to find additional funding to return to Namibia in spring 2015. A second mission to the same areas would enable follow-up on research and provide updated maps of areas already surveyed during this first mission as well as map new areas in the Namib desert to produce high-resolution maps and indices for the Gobabeb researchers.
In the meantime, researchers at Kuzikus Wildlife Reserve, EPFL and UNAM are hard at work analyzing the 350Gb of data that we collected during our short stay. As we gather more concrete results in animal counting and identification, plant health analysis and land management we’ll be posting follow-up stories, hopefully inspiring further research and bringing drone-mapping technology into the hands of conservation leaders.
The mission in numbers:
14 days
2 teams
4 DA members on Namibian ground
4 local researchers involved
91 flights
30 % of Kuzikus making 3000 ha mapped
5 different cameras used (RGB, NIR, RE, Multi-spectral
14963 images acquired
45 hours of mapping
384 hours of processing dataMission partners and sponsors
In addition to our local mission partners Kuzikus and Polytech of Namibia, this mission is part of the SAVMAP project. SAVMAP is co-funded by CODEV (Cooperation & Development Center of EPFL) through LASIG, the Laboratory of Geographic Information Systems of EPFL).
The Drone Adventures team used senseFly eBee mapping drones and Pix4D software for data processing and orthomosaic generation. A special thanks to our friends at Mapbox for hosting our data online.
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