4,000 Robots Roam the Oceans, Climate in Their Crosshairs
June 20th, 2022
Via IEEE Spectrum, an article on the use of sensors to measure the tiny climate-change signals in the deep ocean:
In the puzzle of climate change, Earth’s oceans are an immense and crucial piece. The oceans act as an enormous reservoir of both heat and carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas. But gathering accurate and sufficient data about the oceans to feed climate and weather models has been a huge technical challenge.
Over the years, though, a basic picture of ocean heating patterns has emerged. The sun’s infrared, visible-light, and ultraviolet radiation warms the oceans, with the heat absorbed particularly in Earth’s lower latitudes and in the eastern areas of the vast ocean basins. Thanks to wind-driven currents and large-scale patterns of circulation, the heat is generally driven westward and toward the poles, being lost as it escapes to the atmosphere and space.
This heat loss comes mainly from a combination of evaporation and reradiation into space. This oceanic heat movement helps make Earth habitable by smoothing out local and seasonal temperature extremes. But the transport of heat in the oceans and its eventual loss upward are affected by many factors, such as the ability of the currents and wind to mix and churn, driving heat down into the ocean. The upshot is that no model of climate change can be accurate unless it accounts for these complicating processes in a detailed way. And that’s a fiendish challenge, not least because Earth’s five great oceans occupy 140 million square miles, or 71 percent of the planet’s surface.
Providing such detail is the purpose of the Argo program, run by an international consortium involving 30 nations. The group operates a global fleet of some 4,000 undersea robotic craft scattered throughout the world’s oceans. The vessels are called “floats,” though they spend nearly all of their time underwater, diving thousands of meters while making measurements of temperature and salinity. Drifting with ocean currents, the floats surface every 10 days or so to transmit their information to data centers in Brest, France, and Monterey, Calif. The data is then made available to researchers and weather forecasters all over the world.
The Argo system, which produces more than 100,000 salinity and temperature profiles per year, is a huge improvement over traditional methods, which depended on measurements made from ships or with buoys. The remarkable technology of these floats and the systems technology that was created to operate them as a network was recognized this past May with the IEEE Corporate Innovation Award, at the 2022 Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit. Now, as Argo unveils an ambitious proposal to increase the number of floats to 4,700 and increase their capabilities, IEEE Spectrum spoke with Susan Wijffels, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Mass., and cochair of the Argo steering committee.
Why do we need a vast network like Argo to help us understand how Earth’s climate is changing?
Susan Wijffels: Well, the reason is that the ocean is a key player in Earth’s climate system. So, we know that, for instance, our average climate is really, really dependent on the ocean. But actually, how the climate varies and changes, beyond about a two-to-three-week time scale, is highly controlled by the ocean. And so, in a way, you can think that the future of climate—the future of Earth—is going to be determined partly by what we do, but also by how the ocean responds.
Aren’t satellites already making these kind of measurements?
Wijffels: The satellite observing system, a wonderful constellation of satellites run by many nations, is very important. But they only measure the very, very top of the ocean. They penetrate a couple of meters at the most. Most are only really seeing what’s happening in the upper few millimeters of the ocean. And yet, the ocean itself is very deep, 5, 6 kilometers deep, around the world. And it’s what’s happening in the deep ocean that is critical, because things are changing in the ocean. It’s getting warmer, but not uniformly warm. There’s a rich structure to that warming, and that all matters for what’s going to happen in the future.
How was this sort of oceanographic data collected historically, before Argo?
Wijffels: Before Argo, the main way we had of getting subsurface information, particularly things like salinity, was to measure it from ships, which you can imagine is quite expensive. These are research vessels that are very expensive to operate, and you need to have teams of scientists aboard. They’re running very sensitive instrumentation. And they would simply prepare a package and lower it down the side into the ocean. And to do a 2,000-meter profile, it would maybe take a couple of hours. To go to the seafloor, it can take 6 hours or so.
The ships really are wonderful. We need them to measure all kinds of things. But to get the global coverage we’re talking about, it’s just prohibitive. In fact, there are not enough research vessels in the world to do this. And so, that’s why we needed to try and exploit robotics to solve this problem.
Pick a typical Argo float and tell us something about it, a day in the life of an Argo float or a week in the life. How deep is this float typically, and how often does it transmit data?
Wijffels: They spend 90 percent of their time at 1,000 meters below the surface of the ocean—an environment where it’s dark and it’s cold. A float will drift there for about nine and a half days. Then it will make itself a little bit smaller in volume, which increases its density relative to the seawater around it. That allows it to then sink down to 2,000 meters. Once there, it will halt its downward trajectory, and switch on its sensor package. Once it has collected the intended complement of data, it expands, lowering its density. As the then lighter-than-water automaton floats back up toward the surface, it takes a series of measurements in a single column. And then, once they reach the sea surface, they transmit that profile back to us via a satellite system. And we also get a location for that profile through the global positioning system satellite network. Most Argo floats at sea right now are measuring temperature and salinity at a pretty high accuracy level.
How big is a typical data transmission, and where does it go?
Wijffels: The data is not very big at all. It’s highly compressed. It’s only about 20 or 30 kilobytes, and it goes through the Iridium network now for most of the float array. That data then comes ashore from the satellite system to your national data centers. It gets encoded and checked, and then it gets sent out immediately. It gets logged onto the Internet at a global data assembly center, but it also gets sent immediately to all the operational forecasting centers in the world. So the data is shared freely, within 24 hours, with everyone that wants to get hold of it.
An animated gift of the globe with colored dots to represent the floats.This visualization shows some 3,800 of Argo’s floats scattered across the globe.ARGO PROGRAM
You have 4,000 of these floats now spread throughout the world. Is that enough to do what your scientists need to do?Wijffels: Currently, the 4,000 we have is a legacy of our first design of Argo, which was conceived in 1998. And at that time, our floats couldn’t operate in the sea-ice zones and couldn’t operate very well in enclosed seas. And so, originally, we designed the global array to be 3,000 floats; that was to kind of track what I think of as the slow background changes. These are changes happening across 1,000 kilometers in around three months—sort of the slow manifold of what’s happening to subsurface ocean temperature and salinity.
So, that’s what that design is for. But now, we have successfully piloted floats in the polar oceans and the seasonal sea-ice zones. So we know we can operate them there. And we also know now that there are some special areas like the equatorial oceans where we might need higher densities [of floats]. And so, we have a new design. And for that new design, we need to get about 4,700 operating floats into the water.
But we’re just starting now to really go to governments and ask them to provide the funds to expand the fleet. And part of the new design calls for floats to go deeper. Most of our floats in operation right now go only as deep as about 2,000 meters. But we now can build floats that can withstand the oceans’ rigors down to depths of 6,000 meters. And so, we want to build and sustain an array of about 1,200 deep-profiling floats, with an additional 1,000 of the newly built units capable of tracking the oceans by geochemistry. But this is new. These are big, new missions for the Argo infrastructure that we’re just starting to try and build up. We’ve done a lot of the piloting work; we’ve done a lot of the preparation. But now, we need to find sustained funding to implement that.
Equipment is seen inside a sphere which sits on a table.A new generation of deep-diving Argo floats can reach a depth of 6,000 meters. A spherical glass housing protects the electronics inside from the enormous pressure at that depth.MRV SYSTEMS/ARGO PROGRAM
What is the cost of a typical float?Wijffels: A typical cold float, which just measures temperature, salinity, and operates to 2,000 meters, depending on the country, costs between $20,000 and $30,000 U.S. dollars. But they each last five to seven years. And so, the cost per profile that we get, which is what really matters for us, is very low—particularly compared with other methods [of acquiring the same data].
What kind of insights can we get from tracking heat and salinity and how they’re changing across Earth’s oceans?
Wijffels: There are so many things I could talk about, so many amazing discoveries that have come from the Argo data stream. There’s more than a paper a day that comes out using Argo. And that’s probably a conservative view. But I mean, one of the most important things we need to measure is how the ocean is warming. So, as the Earth system warms, most of that extra heat is actually being trapped in the ocean. Now, it’s a good thing that that heat is taken up and sequestered by the ocean, because it makes the rate of surface temperature change slower. But as it takes up that heat, the ocean expands. So, that’s actually driving sea-level rise. The ocean is pumping heat into the polar regions, which is causing both sea-ice and ice-sheet melt. And we know it’s starting to change regional weather patterns as well. With all that in mind, tracking where that heat is, and how the ocean circulation is moving it around, is really, really important for understanding both what’s happening now to our climate system and what’s going to happen to it in the future.
What has Argo’s data told us about how ocean temperatures have changed over the past 20 years? Are there certain oceans getting warmer? Are there certain parts of oceans getting warmer and others getting colder?
Wijffels: The signal in the deep ocean is very small. It’s a fraction, a hundredth of a degree, really. But we have very high precision instruments on Argo. The warming signal came out very quickly in the Argo data sets when averaged across the global ocean. If you measure in a specific place, say a time series at a site, there’s a lot of noise there because the ocean circulation is turbulent, and it can move heat around from place to place. So, any given year, the ocean can be warm, and then it can be cool…that’s just a kind of a lateral shifting of the signal.
“We have discovered through Argo new current systems that we knew nothing about….There’s just been a revolution in our ability to make discoveries and understand how the ocean works.”
—Susan WijffelsBut when you measure globally and monitor the global average over time, the warming signal becomes very, very apparent. And so, as we’ve seen from past data—and Argo reinforces this—the oceans are warming faster at the surface than at their depths. And that’s because the ocean takes a while to draw the heat down. We see the Southern Hemisphere warming faster than the Northern Hemisphere. And there’s a lot of work that’s going on around that. The discrepancy is partly due to things like aerosol pollution in the Northern Hemisphere’s atmosphere, which actually has a cooling effect on our climate.
But some of it has to do with how the winds are changing. Which brings me to another really amazing thing about Argo: We’ve had a lot of discussion in our community about hiatuses or slowdowns of global warming. And that’s because of the surface temperature, which is the metric that a lot of people use. The oceans have a big effect on the global average surface temperature estimates because the oceans comprise the majority of Earth’s surface area. And we see that the surface temperature can peak when there’s a big El Niño–Southern Oscillation event. That’s because, in the Pacific, a whole bunch of heat from the subsurface [about 200 or 300 meters below the surface] suddenly becomes exposed to the surface. [Editor’s note: The El Niño–Southern Oscillation is a recurring, large-scale variation in sea-surface temperatures and wind patterns over the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean.]
What we see is this kind of chaotic natural phenomena, such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. It just transfers heat vertically in the ocean. And if you measure vertically through the El Niño or the tropical Pacific, that all cancels out. And so, the actual change in the amount of heat in the ocean doesn’t see those hiatuses that appear in surface measurements. It’s just a staircase. And we can see the clear impact of the greenhouse-gas effect in the ocean. When we measure from the surface all the way down, and we measure globally, it’s very clear.
Argo was obviously designed and established for research into climate change, but so many large scientific instruments turn out to be useful for scientific questions other than the ones they were designed for. Is that the case with Argo?
Wijffels: Absolutely. Climate change is just one of the questions Argo was designed to address. It’s really being used now to study nearly all aspects of the ocean, from ocean mixing to just mapping out what the deep circulation, the currents in the deep ocean, look like. We now have very detailed maps of the surface of the ocean from the satellites we talked about, but understanding what the currents are in the deep ocean is actually very, very difficult. This is particularly true of the slow currents, not the turbulence, which is everywhere in the ocean like it is in the atmosphere. But now, we can do that using Argo because Argo gives us a map of the sort of pressure field. And from the pressure field, we can infer the currents. We have discovered through Argo new current systems that we knew nothing about. People are using this knowledge to study the ocean eddy field and how it moves heat around the ocean.
People have also made lots of discoveries about salinity; how salinity affects ocean currents and how it is reflecting what’s happening in our atmosphere. There’s just been a revolution in our ability to make discoveries and understand how the ocean works.
As you pointed out earlier, the signal from the deep ocean is very subtle, and it’s a very small signal. So, naturally, that would prompt an engineer to ask, “How accurate are these measurements, and how do you know that they’re that accurate?”
Wijffels: So, at the inception of the program, we put a lot of resources into a really good data-management and quality-assurance system. That’s the Argo Data Management system, which broke new ground for oceanography. And so, part of that innovation is that we have, in every nation that deploys floats, expert teams that look at the data. When the data is about a year old, they look at that data, and they assess it in the context of nearby ship data, which is usually the gold standard in terms of accuracy. And so, when a float is deployed, we know the sensors are routinely calibrated. And so, if we compare a freshly calibrated float’s profile with an old one that might be six or seven years old, we can make important comparisons. What’s more, some of the satellites that Argo is designed to work with also give us ability to check whether the float sensors are working properly.
And through the history of Argo, we have had issues. But we’ve tackled them head on. We have had issues that originated in the factories producing the sensors. Sometimes, we’ve halted deployments for years while we waited for a particular problem to be fixed. Furthermore, we try and be as vigilant as we can and use whatever information we have around every float record to ensure that it makes sense. We want to make sure that there’s not a big bias, and that our measurements are accurate.
You mentioned earlier there’s a new generation of floats capable of diving to an astounding 6,000 meters. I imagine that as new technology becomes available, your scientists and engineers are looking at this and incorporating it. Tell us how advances in technology are improving your program.
Wijffels: [There are] three big, new things that we want to do with Argo and that we’ve proven we can do now through regional pilots. The first one, as you mentioned, is to go deep. And so that meant reengineering the float itself so that it could withstand and operate under really high pressure. And there are two strategies to that. One is to stay with an aluminum hull but make it thicker. Floats with that design can go to about 4,000 meters. The other strategy was to move to a glass housing. So the float goes from a metal cylinder to a glass sphere. And glass spheres have been used in ocean science for a long time because they’re extremely pressure resistant. So, glass floats can go to those really deep depths, right to the seafloor of most of the global ocean.
The game changer is a set of sensors that are sensitive and accurate enough to measure the tiny climate-change signals that we’re looking for in the deep ocean. And so that requires an extra level of care in building those sensors and a higher level of calibration. And so we’re working with sensor manufacturers to develop and prove calibration methods with tighter tolerances and ways of building these sensors with greater reliability. And as we prove that out, we go to sea on research vessels, we take the same sensors that were in our shipboard systems, and compare them with the ones that we’re deploying on the profiling floats. So, we have to go through a whole development cycle to prove that these work before we certify them for global implementation.
You mentioned batteries. Are batteries what is ultimately the limit on lifetime? I mean, I imagine you can’t recharge a battery that’s 2,000 meters down.
Wijffels: You’re absolutely right. Batteries are one of the key limitations for floats right now as regards their lifetime, and what they’re capable of. If there were a leap in battery technology, we could do a lot more with the floats. We could maybe collect data profiles faster. We could add many more extra sensors.
So, battery power and energy management Is a big, important aspect of what we do. And in fact, the way that we task the floats, it’s been a problem with particularly lithium batteries because the floats spend about 90 percent of their time sitting in the cold and not doing very much. During their drift phase, we sometimes turn them on to take some measurements. But still, they don’t do very much. They don’t use their buoyancy engines. This is the engine that changes the volume of the float.
And what we’ve learned is that these batteries can passivate. And so, we might think we’ve loaded a certain number of watts onto the float, but we never achieved the rated power level because of this passivation problem. But we’ve found different kinds of batteries that really sidestep that passivation problem. So, yes, batteries have been one thing that we’ve had to figure out so that energy is not a limiting factor in float operation.
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Read More »WhatsApp and UN Collaborate To Promote More Sustainable Lifestyles
June 10th, 2022
Via the UN, a report on how – amid the worsening climate crisis – WhatsApp and UN are collaborating to promote more sustainable lifestyles:
In light of rising greenhouse gas emissions and worsening climate impacts around the world, the United Nations ActNow campaign is collaborating with Whatsapp to engage global audiences through an automated messaging service providing tips to shift to more sustainable lifestyles.
“We want to empower people to make climate action an integral part of their daily life and be part of the solution to the climate crisis,” said Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications. “The collaboration with WhatsApp allows us to reach people directly and inspire them to be changemakers.”
The new messaging service, built by Turn.io, offers information on ten actions people can take to make a difference – from switching to a green energy provider, to eating more plant-rich meals, biking instead of driving, saving energy at home, and reusing and repairing clothes. Users can select an action, learn more about it, share it with friends, and log their action.
Targeting primarily individuals in the twenty major economies (G20), which account for close to 80 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the UN’s ActNow campaign, has already seen over 6 million individual climate actions logged through the campaign’s mobile app and messaging functions on Facebook and Instagram.
To tackle the climate crisis, wide-ranging steps needs to be taken first and foremost by governments and businesses. But the transition to a low-carbon world also requires the participation of citizens, especially in advanced economies. Around two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions are linked to private households, when using consumption-based accounting.
According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, shifting consumption patterns, towards cleaner forms of transport or more plant-based foods for example, could cut global greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 40-70 percent by 2050.
The UN Climate Action messaging service on WhatsApp is available in English only for now, with more languages to be launched over the coming months.
To use the service, simply save the number +1 212 738 9268 to your phone contacts and then text the word “hi” in a WhatsApp message to get started. Or just click this link https://wa.me/12127389268?text=hi.
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Read More »Google’s Dynamic World Uses AI To Analyze Satellite Data
June 10th, 2022
Via Fast Company, an article on a new tool from Google that shows how the planet is changing in near real time:
The planet changes quickly: More than half a million acres are burning in New Mexico. A megadrought is shrinking Lake Mead. The Alps are turning from white to green. Development continues to expand, from cities to massive solar farms. All of these changes impact the Earth’s climate and biodiversity. But in the past, such changes have been difficult to track in detail as they’re happening.
A new tool from Google Earth Engine and the nonprofit World Resources Institute pulls from satellite data to build detailed maps in near real time. Called Dynamic World, it zooms in on the planet in 10-by-10-meter squares from satellite images collected every two to five days. The program uses artificial intelligence to classify each pixel based on nine categories that range from bare ground to trees, crops, and buildings.
Researchers, nonprofits, and other users can “explore and track and monitor changes in these terrestrial ecosystems over time,” says Tanya Birch, senior program manager for Google Earth Outreach. As the tool was being built last year, Birch used it in the days after the Caldor Fire, a wildfire that burned more than 200,000 acres in California. The pixels in satellite images quickly changed from being classified as “trees” to “shrub and scrub.”
Scientists used to rely on statistical tables that were sometimes released only every five years, says Fred Stolle, deputy director of the World Resources Institute’s Forests Program. “That’s clearly not good enough anymore,” he says. “We’re changing so fast, and the impact is so fast, that satellites are now the way to go.”
Researchers and planners already use satellite data in some applications—the World Resources Institute, for example, previously worked with Google to build Global Forest Watch, a tool that can track deforestation using satellite images. But the new data is much more detailed; now it’s sometimes possible to see if one or two trees are cut down in a tropical forest, even when a larger area is intact, Stolle says.
In cities, planners could use the data to easily see which neighborhoods don’t have enough green space. Researchers studying smallholder farms in Africa could use it to see the impacts of drought and when crops are being harvested. Because the data is continuously updated, it’s also possible to watch the seasons change throughout the year across the entire planet. The data goes back five years, and using the new tool, anyone can enter date ranges to see how a location has changed over time.
“I encourage people to dive into it and explore,” Birch says. “There’s a lot of depth and a lot of richness in Dynamic World. . . . I feel like this is really pushing the frontier of mapmaking powered by AI in an incredibly novel way.”
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Read More »eBird
June 6th, 2022
Via Verge, an article on eBird, a social network that connects people to each other and also with birds:
It was a beach date that would transform Chris Michaud, though the memorable parts were neither the beach nor the date but what he saw that day. Both in their early 30s, summer of 2017, Chris had met Gemma recently, swiping on Bumble. They decided to head to the New Hampshire coast, not far from where they both lived in Portsmouth. Before arriving at the beach, Gemma suggested they do a little birding.
In a marsh, they spotted egrets, a glossy ibis, and “some other cool stuff.” Later, they went to the beach, as promised, but Chris just kept thinking about the birds. This moment, in birding lingo, is called the “spark,” when a person sees something that inspires them to be a birder for life. (Nearly everyone I talked to for this story had a spark and volunteered their story whether I asked for it or not.)
Since then, Chris has been an avid birder and, like many avid birders, is a frequent user of an app called eBird. Naturally, bird watching today involves going out into the world, encountering something wonderful, strange, perhaps even profound or moving, and then logging it on your phone.
Along with Merlin, which helps people identify species of birds, eBird lets people keep track of the ones they’ve seen and, in doing so, become part of a crowdsourced, citizen-science mission. Whether users care or not, the millions of birds being observed tell scientists about huge patterns in climate change.
For Chris, though, using eBird is about the thrill of adding every new species he encounters. When we first speak, he immediately summons the exact number of different birds he’d seen: “315 species — pretty cool, right?”
Though Gemma was studying birds professionally as an ornithologist, it was Chris who became the bigger birding hobbyist. When they went together, Chris would be quick to suggest a bird was rare. Gemma tended to make safer guesses, to assume what was more likely. Chris understood — but what if? It was the personality divide you might expect between a woman of science and a man who works in marketing.
The reality, for Chris, was that getting into birds was a confluence of many things. There was the budding relationship, the struggle to get sober, that relationship fracturing, and, then, the cancer.
Alcoholism, breakups, even lymphoma — sad as they are, these are things that happen to lots of people. But not everyone got to see what Chris did because, eventually, he bore witness to a rare bird — an appearance so exceptional that everyone I asked would agree that, if you were very lucky, it was something you got to witness once in a lifetime. A once-in-a-lifetime bird!
For Chris, birding was existential, maybe even lifesaving. And it could be for the rest of us too, whether we know it or not. Anomalous, unusual sightings are thrilling to birders, but it’s the sum of all their everyday, boring observations that tell us the most about the world we live in, and how we might save it.
To experience nature is to delight in it. To reckon with nature is to understand that we’re dealing with an unfathomable amount of loss.
A 2019 study published in Science discovered that in North America, nearly 3 billion birds have vanished. The staggering decline of bird populations over the past 50 years is the result of “human-altered landscapes” and “an indicator of a coming collapse of the overall environment.” You know, climate change.
The data that eBird collects is obviously useful in the field of ornithology. But its more urgent application, according to Chris Wood, director of eBird, is comprehending our dying planet. “Birds as indicators of natural systems overall,” he explains. Any data that is spatial and temporal is useful for climate scientists. But birds especially, because of their susceptibility to minor temperature fluctuations, can be more reliable signals of change. He apologizes for the cliché, then evokes the notion of a canary in a coal mine. To me, the metaphor says less about birds but more powerfully suggests that we all live in a coal mine.
Who am I? What am I doing? What is interesting to me? What do I care about?
When I speak with Wood, who is also the managing director for the Center for Avian Population Studies, he has recently absconded to Tampa for the winter. He’s been working on eBird ever since it started as an informal grant from the National Science Foundation. This month marks 20 years since eBird launched originally as a website. As a tool of mass data collection, the two decades of eBird development have paralleled the tech sector’s shift from statistical analysis to artificial intelligence. (You can chart that change in buzz words — from “AI” to ”big data” to “machine learning” and back to “AI.”)
Climate change is a systems problem, and the prevailing attitude among scientists is that understanding those many ecological apparatuses and how they interact with each other is our best shot at modeling what will happen and how fucked or not fucked we might be. Birds may make up just one of those many systems, but eBird offers one of the few global data sets that can be measured across an annual cycle.
Still, eBird’s value follows a familiar tactic from large advertising platforms like Google and Facebook: lots and lots of signals generated by users of a free app. Which means a wealth of messy data points. The best way to overcome unreliable data? Get more of it at scale. When it comes to gathering information, there’s no such thing as excess.
Several people I spoke to compared the app to Pokémon, in the sense that they were motivated “to catch them all.” But in many ways, eBird is the flipside. Where Pokémon Go, the popular mobile iteration of the game, takes all of its massive stores of player geolocation data and sells it to — who else? — advertisers, the data collected by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is made publicly available and used for scientific research. In contrast to surveillance capitalism, this is, perhaps, surveillance naturalism.
It’s hard to know how much drinking will kill a person until it does.
In the early ’00s, Chris was in Maine’s music industry. He was the baritone sax player for a screamo band called Animal Suit Driveby, later rebranded The Killing Moon after the label asked for a more serious name. But more importantly, he was part of the scene. “We were raging, we were rampaging, having a good time,” he recalls. Reviewing our interview transcript later, I realize, for how often we’re talking about drinking, Chris tends to avoid the word itself.
That life — raging, rampaging, having a good time — extended into his 30s, even long after his moment in music passed.
Gemma had her concerns. Before he went out, she’d ask him tough questions that were, in hindsight, easy questions: Could he go out to dinner and not have six drinks alone? Could he resist going to a bar after that? Was it even possible to imagine limiting himself to just one drink?
So he got sober. It was hard for all the obvious reasons; it was also difficult because sobriety was so boring.
“When you’re in your 30s, that’s all you’ve done in your formative adult years. You have no actual hobbies, and all you are is that party person, and all your friends are those party people,” he says. Pulling out cold turkey — which, for most people, is the only way to do it — left him with existential questions: Who am I? What am I doing? What is interesting to me? What do I care about?
Chris goes birding for three, maybe four hours at a time. His favorite spot is near a waste-water treatment plant in Rochester, New Hampshire. Chris prefers the solitude of birding alone. He considers himself an introvert, at least ever since he stopped drinking. “I like to be able to pick up and go wherever, switch directions and drive somewhere else, and not have to worry about anyone else,” he says, which is good because he was by himself now anyway.
Two and a half years into their relationship, Gemma was offered a three-year contract at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which in addition to making eBird, is widely considered the best avian studies program in the world. The job was six hours west in upstate New York. Chris offered to pack up his life and move to Ithaca with her. Gemma said she was going alone.
Two weeks after Gemma left, Chris was diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that attacks white blood cells. Weirdly, he was good news / bad news about the whole thing. “First up, Hodgkin’s is a great cancer,” he says, citing its treatability, “but stage 4 is never a great stage to be in.”
More ups and downs: because the chemo jacked Chris’ body full of steroids, it actually made him feel pretty terrific for a day or two afterward — the perfect opportunity to get outside. No hikes, of course, but little drives to the beach to hobble around and observe some birds. Then, after the steroids wore off, Chris would spend the next week and a half feeling like absolute death.
He was stuck in this loop for six months straight: the brief high of treatment, followed by the drawn-out agony, all in the pursuit of staying alive long enough for the cancer to be exorcised from his body.
Even while he was being treated, getting pumped with four types of chemo, he was texting Gemma. They’d remained friends and talked every day. “A lot of times, it was like, ‘Check out this picture of this bird,’ that sort of thing, while I’m sitting, literally cooking from the inside,” he says, describing himself further as “a boiling, toxic mess.”
“I don’t think there’s ever a time when I go out that I don’t think of the genesis of this entire hobby and who brought it into my life,” he says.
The nice thing about getting outside and birding is that it reminded him of Gemma — but also, it reminded him of Gemma.
At its heart, eBird is a social network. It connects people to each other and also with birds.
But any social network must have social network problems, right? I ask Jenna Curtis, an eBird project leader who works on engagement and outreach. But first, she tells me about her “spark” — her first bird — and also her thousandth, memorable both because it was a Buller’s shearwater and because she saw it while at sea and seasick. “I was cheering my thousandth bird over the railing of a boat.”
I mentioned that a friend of mine in Brooklyn, a casual birder, is a huge eBird fan. But he told me that if you see an owl, it is bad etiquette to log it. In New York in particular, listing snowy owls in Central Park tended to activate waves of birders — too many, a number that would disturb the owl. Comedian Steve Martin had posted about the celebrity bird on Facebook; recently, the death of local hero Barry the Owl was reported out like it was a true-crime podcast (she was poisoned… before being hit by a truck!). Curtis says this can be the case with owls — they are “a charismatic bird” — and some other species, particularly endangered ones. Diplomatically, Wood told me he never wants to be quoted about “anything related to owls.”
Even a social network about birds has harassment issues, though this one is concerned about the safety of the birds.
But eBird also keeps an index of “sensitive species” for this reason, meaning that when a user observes one, it will be kept in their personal log but obscured from public view. No alerts will go out for sensitive birds. Falcons, often caught and traded to raptor trainers, are usually hidden from eBird for their own protection. (Even a social network about birds has harassment issues, though this one is concerned about the safety of the birds.)Somewhat ironically, a number of experts attributed the growing popularity of birding as a reaction to people’s growing dependence on screen time. Anecdotally, there are those who pick up birding because they wish to look at their phones less. But common trends in technology have also bolstered the hobby. There is eBird, of course, which capitalizes on our habit of posting things in an app. But there is also the proliferation of cheaper, better cameras — digital SLRs are available, and nearly everyone walks around with a powerful lens on their phone. The community of amateur photographers tends to organize in Facebook groups. An even broader community exists on Twitter, where birding evangelists help newbies identify species from grainy photos. #CrowOrNo is, self-explanatorily, a constant quiz of whether something is a crow or not.
But you can chart birding’s growing popularity through eBird’s user numbers, which have nearly doubled over the pandemic to more than a quarter-million people. (One person I talked to said, “Are you really a birder if you don’t use eBird?”) Last year, the app logged its billionth bird observation. Maybe we can spot birds faster than we lose them.
The academic world is cruel and a bit petty. “There’s the ‘publish or die’ concept, and you’re always comparing yourself to other people,” Gemma Clucas says. She spends a lot of her time writing things for journals that no one ever reads.
At Oxford, she researched the connectivity of penguin colonies in Antarctica. In Portsmouth, she studied Atlantic cod for her postdoc. Now, in Ithaca, one of her big projects is about seabird diets. “I’m just doing some fecal DNA analysis or whatever,” she says. The whatever, it turns out, involves going to common and roseate tern colonies in the Gulf of Maine, covering herself in plastic, getting pooped on, and collecting the samples. “And that tells me what they’re eating.”
I have about 400 questions. Like, is there a special poop-collecting jacket? There is not, she says — just the old clothes you don’t mind getting shit on.
So they poop on you, and you’re scraping off your shirt and…
“Yeah.”
She’ll take a couple weeks in the summer to visit the colony each day while they’re breeding. She’ll collect two to three hundred samples.
(It occurs to me that Gemma’s work has less to do with acquiring feces and more what she does with it after. This doesn’t change my line of questioning.)
Is there a thing you do to encourage them to poop?
“As soon as you come close to their nest, pooping on you is their defense mechanism.”
Before she got the offer from Cornell, Gemma was in the midst of a crisis of competence. For the last decade, academic jobs have become underfunded and underpaid, and that’s only made them more competitive. “I found it really hard to write the application,” she says. “I was like, ‘I can’t do this. I’m not good enough.’” Her acceptance at Cornell felt like a reversal of fortune. She had to take it.
When she told Chris about the job, that she was leaving, he had a panic attack. Gemma took him to the hospital. They would try to be friends.
Two months later, Gemma was back in the UK, visiting home, when Chris called to tell her about the cancer. She considered taking a break from Cornell to take care of him, worried about his health and also that he might relapse. “I wished we were still together because I would’ve dropped everything to go support him if I could,” she says. “But that wasn’t an option. That’s not what he wanted.”
They texted every day. Gemma went to visit. Chris was the kind of person resistant to getting support or, perhaps, admitting that he needed it. She tried to get him outside. “I think that helped,” Gemma says. “I like to think it helped.”
For a brief moment, the most famous birder was Christian Cooper. He was looking for songbirds in Central Park when he was accosted by a white woman named Amy Cooper, who threatened to call the police on Christian for being, in her eyes, a large and threatening Black man, even though he had a pair of dorky binoculars dangling from his neck.
It was a viral moment on Twitter before it reached other social platforms and then, inevitably, the cable news cycle. Lost in much of the conversation about anti-Blackness, white privilege, and policing was the fact that Christian Cooper was birding. It’s how their confrontation started: Christian asking Amy to put her dog on a leash since they scare away birds. But it seemed to her that the image of Christian was too incongruous, which is an insidious form of racism: when a person cannot reconcile what they perceive as an identity with what is actually in front of them. The usual reaction to that is defensiveness or fear or, in Amy’s case, indignation.
Nearly every person I talked to for this story at some point brought up the fact that birding is, historically, very white and often very male and usually made up of older people. But that’s not entirely the case.
Sheridan Alford is an environmental educator and also an advocate for younger, more diverse birders.
Binoculars, she says, are more conspicuous than I’d realized, especially if you’re birding somewhere that’s not a park. She has other tips for Black birders: go during the daytime, and if you have to go at night — for nocturnal birds, like owls — go in large groups; take along a dog or a white person; carry a field guide, less for what it says about nature but as proof that you’re birding, in case someone doubts you; and lastly, when birding takes you to private property, she “would not be caught dead on the other side of someone’s fence.”
If Twitter offers a hint of a community’s cross section, Alford sees more diversity than Black and white. She cites the South Americans being active on birding hashtags, “which makes sense because they have all the birds,” she says, admitting a little jealousy. She also sees Asians, who tend to be obsessed with the photography aspect of birding. (I concede to her that I have a Vietnamese uncle who does exactly this.)
Alford was one of the organizers of Black Birders Week, an online campaign to get people — newbies and veterans alike — out of their homes and into nature during the pandemic. The idea came from a group text called Black in STEM AF, after a conversation about Christian Cooper’s experience. Organized in a group chat and then spread across Instagram and Twitter, suddenly it was a national campaign and, since then, repeated annually. This month, National Geographic announced a TV series with Christian Cooper.
Before we get off the phone, Alford leaves me with one last piece of wisdom.
“You can always get started by just walking outside. You don’t have to get super expensive binoculars,” she says. “To see a bird is to bird. That’s all!”
By the end of 2020, Chris had moved back to rural Maine. His marketing job at Planet Fitness was mostly Zoom meetings anyway, so it hardly mattered where he was living. Why not save some money and get out of the city?
The cancer was in remission. He was still recovering from what the chemo did to his body. His eyebrows grew back. But after a year inside, the pandemic arrived and extended his lockdown.
Chris’ parents had a place in a tiny, remote town called Steuben. Now, between conference calls and emails, Chris could look out the window and glimpse a stoat, maybe a fox. One day, above the marsh, he caught sight of a small bird perched atop a scraggly, dead tree. At first, he thought it was a shrike — affectionately nicknamed a “butcherbird” for the way it murders field mice. But Chris looked closer and realized it was… a weird robin?
Initially, he assumed it was a juvenile robin. Young birds looked, to Chris, “disheveled and gross… the wrong color and speckle-y.” Ugly but unremarkable. He returned to his conference call. Yet something in the back of Chris’ mind screamed, This is not right. So he took his camera out and, from his desk, snapped a few photos of the bird.
The pictures were not great. They were pixelated, out of focus, foggy. (“It’s a shitty camera.”) He put the seven photos in a folder named “weird robin.” He sent it to Gemma.
Gemma was skeptical, knowing how excitable Chris could be. She tends to be more cautious since, in her field, there’s a stigma around getting things wrong. As an amateur, the stakes for Chris were a bit lower, which meant he could be more hopeful, more wishful, though that may have actually made the stakes higher.
Still, Gemma showed her co-workers at the Cornell Lab the photos of Chris’ “weird robin.”
Chris, proving that excitability, recounted that moment: “She started sending texts back from them. They’re like, ‘Holy shit, this is a redwing!’”
As a non-birder, this means nothing to me, so Chris explains: this bird is not an uncommon one. The redwing can be found easily in Sweden, Iceland, and in the UK when they migrate in the winter. But to see one thousands of miles away — across the Atlantic Ocean, no less — that was unbelievable. The enthusiasm around this bird was not what it was but where.
There’s a term for this observation: an ABA rarity, short for American Birding Association, which is responsible for, among other things, sending out an email of notable sightings.
“If there’s a rare bird in Maine and I’m not looking at it, I’m just miserable until then.”
Because of the reach of eBird’s “rare bird alert,” users like Chris feel some responsibility about what they report. Birders are known to descend on rare bird sightings in droves, sometimes in the hundreds, hoping to catch a glimpse. They’ll drive for hours; some might even hop on cross-country flights. This phenomenon is called “twitching.”It’s not just owls. In the fall of 2020, a European cuckoo had twitchers swarming Providence, Rhode Island. (You can guess what the headlines were.)
Chris understands this impulse because he, too, is an “unapologetic twitcher.”
How far do you go when you’re twitching?
“Not that long. Probably, like, two hours maybe.”
That’s pretty far.
“Like I said, people will drive, like, 15 hours.”
Chris was new to the area. He’d been there four months and had yet to meet his neighbors. He worried that setting off a chain of events that would result in droves of strangers showing up suddenly and with binoculars might piss off long-time Steuben residents. After all, you don’t live in a thousand-person town in rural Maine because you like company.
“It was like Chris’ dream come true but at the absolute worst time when he couldn’t have hundreds of birders flocking to see his bird,” Gemma says. “That was the really bittersweet thing about it.” (The redwing was not particularly special to her personally, having seen them often growing up in the UK.)
Chris’ other worry was that he looked like a bit of “a flatlander.”
“Flatlander” — is that a Maine thing or a birding thing?
“That’s a Maine thing.” He clarifies: if you’re “from away,” you’re a flatlander. “I’m a new guy in town. I’m a flatlander with New Hampshire plates.”
So Chris made a choice. He didn’t log it in eBird, worried that it might set off the ABA rarity email. Instead, he emailed the Audubon Society. He was connected with the staff naturalist, who then hit up someone at the Maine Bird Records Committee.
Etiquette aside, Chris still had his concerns about triggering a twitching. “I was like, ‘You can come to my parents’ house, but you can’t tell anyone.’ They were like, ‘Oh my god, yes.’”
It would have to be a secret but not a total secret. You know, for science. In the case of rare bird sightings, you bring in the authorities to verify it. Also, these guys really wanted to see this bird.
One of those guys, Louis Bevier, harbors some skepticism of eBird. His concerns come from 50 years of experience. In the ’70s, he was part of a movement that established record committees that encouraged people to write good descriptions, take clear photos, and capture audio recordings whenever they could — which would then be independently verified. He’s done bird work in California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and, finally, Maine, where he has been involved with the Maine Bird Records Committee for the past 17 years.
After proudly telling me he was not on any “of the social medias,” Bevier said he recognizes the power of what eBird collects. But he has some worries about the quality of the information. “When I review things, I’ll see people put in photographs of common birds, and they’re the wrong species,” he says.
All data sets are imperfect, but there are better ways to gauge error rates than what eBird is currently doing, Bevier says. To his knowledge, no one’s done a study on eBird’s accuracy.
A research associate at Cornell Labs, Frank La Sorte, pushed back on these criticisms of the information quality, arguing that sampling errors are a part of any data set. There are robust tools that account for these issues. On top of that, anomalies are manually verified by a team of volunteer eBird moderators.
But to Bevier, eBird is a new entrant that relies on amateurs rather than ones that are, to him, more rigorously vetted by experts. “In my years of reviewing records, I’ve seen the whole breadth of human behavior,” he says.
There are the embellishers; then, there are the straight-up liars, committing what I would describe as “bird fraud.” Sometimes it involves a bad Photoshop job. One guy took a picture of a common tern and put a different, larger head on it to make it appear to be a royal tern. The hope was his fake rare bird sighting might direct people to his photography business. Bevier also tells me about someone that lied about spotting a rare seabird from the Antarctic and made up some convoluted story about seeing it while on a boat in Monterey, California. His motives, to this day, are still unknown.
Most errors, of course, are honest ones. “People are just not being careful,” he says.
If it is human to err, maybe it comes from a place of optimism. The rigor of science and research will help us understand what’s wrong with the planet; but hope — even in the face of devastation — keeps people alive.
When Bevier heard about the redwing spotted in Steuben, he was suspicious, too. But it wasn’t entirely unexpected. BirdCast, another Cornell Labs product, uses eBird data to predict migration and weather patterns. Recently, it revealed that birds flying between Greenland, Iceland, and other parts of Europe had made appearances in the area. Even Bevier, with half a century of birding under his belt, had to be excited by the prospect of a redwing.
“Well, that would be the first record for Maine!”
Doug Hitchcox, the staff naturalist at Maine Audubon, gets dozens of emails a day asking him to identify birds: What’s this bird? Can you tell me what this is?
“And they’re robins. They’re almost all robins,” he says.
Hitchcox started as a volunteer for the Audubon. A decade later, now in his early 30s, he is a fixture of the Maine birding scene. Throughout our conversation, he alludes vaguely to the community, where certain figures will keep rare bird sightings to themselves, and how he’s had to overcome that “elitism.”
Hitchcox was visiting his family in Massachusetts for Christmas when he received Chris’ email with the redwing. Hitchcox turned to his loved ones and told them he had to go. He understands himself, you see: “If there’s a rare bird in Maine and I’m not looking at it, I’m just miserable until then,” he tells me.
The ABA has a numbered coding system for bird rarity. The highest is a five. Chris’ redwing clocked in at a four, which, Hitchcox says, “you maybe have a once-in-a-lifetime chance of seeing.” A code four happens in Maine maybe once every half-decade. A redwing may never appear in the state again. Christmas, by contrast, happens every year.
Three days later, Hitchcox woke up at 3AM. He picked up Louis Bevier in his Prius, and they drove up Route 1A toward the coast, admiring the ascending sun peeking over Acadia National Park. Bevier observed a thin crescent moon, rising as well, as they made their way to Steuben.
Chris greeted the duo at his house at 7AM, pleasant and slightly begrudging that it was the earliest he’d woken up during the pandemic. Despite his high spirits, he was nervous about bothering the locals. So they treaded lightly, so as to not upset Chris’ neighbors before he’d even met them. “We were three dudes walking around where there’s not usually three dudes walking around,” Chris says.
He showed them the perch where the bird sat when he’d snapped the original photos. Perhaps it might return to that spot. Then they wandered all over, hopeful.
By the end of the day, Hitchcox knew the names of all of Chris’ neighbors. “We talked about the bird, and it would turn into Chris just introducing himself, talking about how his family bought the house,” Hitchcox recounts. But after five hours of seeking out the rare bird, it never materialized. No redwing anywhere. Chris kept apologizing — “God, guys, I’m so sorry. I just feel terrible.”
I asked Hitchcox if he felt disappointed that day, and his response led me to believe that he had been nothing short of devastated: “There was my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity… gone.”
Bevier, who has been birding now for 50 years, was less disheartened: “I’m used to it, at this point. I don’t get dejected,” Bevier says. “That’s the breaks.”
Days later, a redwing did appear just 180 miles southwest in Portland, Maine. It was a much better, safer location for visiting birders — a public park instead of someone’s backyard. The ABA email announced it. The thrush stuck around the city for two weeks, where Hitchcox estimated a few hundred people turned up to witness it.
Hitchcox says the tone of our conversation would have been very different if the redwing hadn’t shown up in Portland. “I would not be laughing.”
After comparing his photos to what the ABA released, Chris is personally convinced that the redwing that appeared in Portland is a different one, based on the breast streaking. It wasn’t his redwing.
When the news of the rare bird in Portland emerged, Chris took pride in knowing he’d been the first person to sight one in Maine — and, later, quietly logged it in his phone.
Many rare birds are just lost. In 2018, a great black hawk — usually native to Central and South America — was spotted in Texas for the first time. A few months later, the same neotropical bird was found in Biddeford, Maine, then later in Portland. It was briefly the state’s celebrity bird before the hawk — a Mexican bird in Maine winter — suffered injuries from exposure and was euthanized. A statue of the bird exists now, monument to the stray raptor.
We know now what threw Chris’ redwing off course, turning it from a common European bird to a once-in-a-lifetime one in America. The catalyst: a low-pressure system, turning counterclockwise, scooped the redwing up and hurled it across the Atlantic. A 2018 study by Cornell Labs indicates these increasingly common wind changes are caused by climate change. What once was rare may become less so as our weather systems collapse.
I have a hard time reconciling it: that thousands of people will come to gawk at something because it is out of place. Or the irony of the massive carbon footprint created by people who want to appreciate something in nature.
The planet’s greatest threat is people that “have no connection with the natural world and don’t care.”
“Birdwatchers love these unusual sightings,” Frank La Sorte says after I tell him about Chris’ redwing. But this isn’t what scientists are interested in. They want to study patterns, not exceptions. “We want people to go out there and find the birds. We don’t want to discourage them. But as scientists, the outliers are statistically problematic.”The things we see every day are valuable. The once-in-a-lifetime experience that was so meaningful to Chris is the kind of data point that scientists tend to discard.
La Sorte sends me some of his research, gathered from eBird data, which has been published in scientific journals: migratory birds at higher risks because of climate change, something about anomalies in the mid-latitudes. I find even the summaries dense, so much so that he has to walk me through them.
With eBird, Cornell Labs has an extremely accessible way to get the average person to understand their surroundings. But that gets transformed into material published in fairly inaccessible journals.
“As a scientist, you’re focused on doing really rigorous science that often can be quite abstract,” La Sorte says. “Now I’m realizing that there’s importance in communicating this to a broader audience.” He’s working on publishing something that “synthesizes the material” and is written “in a more layman set of terms.”
eBird managing director Chris Wood has a simpler, more ambitious goal in mind. To him, the planet’s greatest threat is people that “have no connection with the natural world and don’t care.” Birders may be overeager, but in many ways, they overcome the biggest obstacle to a sustainable future: apathy.
It’s not until another 451 days that I talk to Chris Michaud again. The week before, he’d gotten checked out, and the cancer was still in remission. His eBird life list has risen to 342. According to an oddly specific app called Sober Time, he hasn’t had a drink in 1518.53 days.
More importantly, Chris is in a much better place now — emotionally, physically, and geographically (he’d moved back to Portsmouth). He’s still single, but he and Gemma talk, as friends, just as often as before. The new thing is that he’s into Zen Buddhist meditation, which he does daily. And, of course, there is still the birding. After our call, he says he’ll go out and enjoy it in the 70-degree weather.
The life-changing thing about Chris’ redwing wasn’t its appearance. It’s what he learned when it was over: that the rare bird event was another way to not think about what was really haunting his mind. “Seeing the redwing was a massive bright spot,” he says, “but I was in the deepest, darkest hole.” The truth was that the winter of 2020, which he spent isolated in a pastoral cabin, had put him in deep depression. “Woof,” Chris says, giving me the gritty details of his headspace.
With hindsight, he had a revelation: that a once-in-a-lifetime event is easier to conceive of because the things that happen every day are more painful. That to never have a drink again, he would have to wake up each morning and think about all the things he needed to do — exercise, bird, meditate — to move forward, to keep on living.
Do you think most about the past, present, or future?
“All the strategy in the world doesn’t actually solve anything whatsoever,” Chris says. “But yeah, it’s always the future.”
Do we have a future on this planet? I don’t know. Even the climate scientists, observing day by day the slow collapse of systems, aren’t sure. But maybe I was overthinking it. We could, like Chris, just take each day as it arrives. I returned to some advice I’d once been given:
To see a bird is to bird. That’s all!
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Read More »Satellites and AI Can Help Solve Big Problems—If Given the Chance
June 6th, 2022
Via Wired, a report on some of the hurdles that stand in the way of ambitious plans to use imagery to help feed people, reduce poverty, and protect the planet:
For the past three decades, three decades, geologist Carlos Souza has worked at the Brazil-based nonprofit Imazon, exploring ways he and the teams he coordinates can use applied science to protect the Amazon rainforest. For much of that time, satellite imagery has been a big part of his job.
In the early 2000s, Souza and colleagues came to understand that 90 percent of deforestation occurs within 5 kilometers of newly created roads. While satellites have long been able to track road expansion, the old way of doing things required people to label those findings by hand, amassing what would eventually become training data. Those years of labor paid off last fall with the release of an AI system that Imazon says reveals 13 times more roadway than the previous method, with an accuracy rate of between 70 and 90 percent.
Proponents of satellite imagery and machine learning have ambitious plans to solve big problems at scale. The technology can play a role in anti-poverty campaigns, protect the environment, help billions of people obtain street addresses, and increase crop yields in the face of intensifying climate change. A UNESCO report published this spring highlights 100 AI models with the potential to transform the world for the better. But despite recent advances in deep learning and the quality of satellite imagery, as well as the record number of satellites expected to enter orbit over the next few years, ambitious efforts to use AI to solve big problems at scale still encounter traditional hurdles, like government bureaucracy or a lack of political will or resources.
Stopping deforestation, for instance, requires more than spotting the problem from space. A Brazilian federal government program helped reduce deforestation from 2004 to 2012 by 80 percent compared to previous years, but then federal support waned. In keeping with an election promise, President Jair Bolsonaro weakened enforcement and encouraged opening the rainforest to industry and cattle ranch settlers. As a result, deforestation in the Amazon reached the highest levels seen in more than a decade.
Other AI-focused conservation groups have run into similar issues. Global Fishing Watch uses machine learning models to identify vessels that turn off GPS systems to avoid detection; they’re able to predict the type of ship, the kind of fishing gear it carries, and where it’s heading. Ideally that information helps authorities around the world target illegal fishing and inform decisions to board boats for inspection at sea, but policing large swaths of the ocean is difficult. Global Fishing Watch’s tech spotted hundreds of boats engaged in illegal squid fishing in 2020, data that head of research David Kroodsma credits with increasing cooperation between China and South Korea, but it didn’t lead to any particular prosecution. Enforcement in ports, he says, is “key to making deterrence scalable and affordable.”
Back on land, the consulting company Capgemini is working with The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group, to track trails in the Mojave Desert and protect endangered animal habitats from human activity. In a pilot program last year, the initiative mapped trails created by off-road vehicles in hundreds of square miles of satellite imagery in Clark County, Nevada, to create an AI model that can automatically identify newly created roads. Based on that work, The Nature Conservancy intends to expand the project to monitor the entirety of the desert, which stretches more than 47,000 square miles across four US states.
However, as in the Amazon, identifying problem areas only gets you so far if there aren’t enough resources to act on those findings. The Nature Conservancy uses its AI model to inform conversations with land managers about potential threats to wildlife or biodiversity. Conservation enforcement in the Mojave Desert is overseen by the US Bureau of Land Management, which only has about 270 rangers and special agents on duty.
In northern Europe, the company Iceye got its start monitoring ice buildup in the waters near Finland with microsatellites and machine learning. But in the past two years, the company began to predict flood damage using microwave wavelength imagery that can see through clouds at any time of day. The biggest challenge now, says Iceye’s VP of analytics, Shay Strong, isn’t engineering spacecraft, data processing, or refining machine learning models that have become commonplace. It’s dealing with institutions stuck in centuries-old ways of doing things.
“We can more or less understand where things are going to happen, we can acquire imagery, we can produce an analysis. But the piece we have the biggest challenge with now is still working with insurance companies or governments,” she says.
“It’s that next step of local coordination and implementation that it takes to come up with action,” says Hamed Alemohammad, chief data scientist at the nonprofit Radiant Earth Foundation, which uses satellite imagery to tackle sustainable development goals like ending poverty and hunger. “That’s where I think the industry needs to put more emphasis and effort. It’s not just about a fancy blog post and deep learning model.”
It’s often not only about getting policymakers on board. In a 2020 analysis, a cross-section of academic, government, and industry researchers highlighted the fact that the African continent has a majority of the world’s uncultivated arable land and is expected to account for a large part of global population growth in the coming decades. Satellite imagery and machine learning could reduce reliance on food imports and turn Africa into a breadbasket for the world. But, they said, lasting change will necessitate a buildup of professional talent with technical knowledge and government support so Africans can make technology to meet the continent’s needs instead of importing solutions from elsewhere. “The path from satellite images to public policy decisions is not straightforward,” they wrote.
Labaly Toure is a coauthor of that paper and head of the geospatial department at an agricultural university in Senegal. In that capacity and as founder of Geomatica, a company providing automated satellite imagery solutions for farmers in West Africa, he’s seen satellite imagery and machine learning help decision-makers recognize how the flow of salt can impact irrigation and influence crop yields. He’s also seen it help settle questions of how long a family has been on a farm and assist with land management issues.
Sometimes free satellite images from services like NASA’s LandSat or the European Space Agency’s Sentinel program suffice, but some projects require high-resolution photos from commercial providers, and cost can present a challenge.
“If decision-makers know [the value] it can be easy, but if they don’t know, it’s not always easy,” Toure said.
Back in Brazil, in the absence of federal support, Imazon is now forging ties with more policymakers at the state level. “Right now, there’s no evidence the federal government will lead conservation or deforestation efforts in the Amazon,” says Souza. In October 2022, Imazon signed cooperation agreements with public prosecutors gathering evidence of environmental crimes in four Brazilian states on the border of the Amazon rainforest to share information that can help prioritize enforcement resources.
When you prosecute people who deforest protected lands, the damage has already been done. Now Imazon wants to use AI to stop deforestation before it happens, interweaving that road-detection model with one designed to predict which communities bordering the Amazon are at the highest risk of deforestation within the next year.
Deforestation continued at historic rates in early 2022, but Souza is hopeful that through work with nonprofit partners, Imazon can expand its deforestation AI to the other seven South American countries that touch the Amazon rainforest.
And Brazil will hold a presidential election this fall. The current leader in the polls, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to strengthen enforcement agencies weakened by Bolsonaro and to reestablish the Amazon Fund for foreign reforestation investments. Lula’s environmental plan isn’t expected out for a few months, but environmental ministers from his previous term in office predict he will make reforestation a cornerstone of his platform.
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Read More »“Black Ships” and Space: Using Satellites To Combat Illegal Fishing
June 1st, 2022
Via The Interpreter, a report on the use of satellite technology to tackle China’s illegal fishing:
At the first in-person leaders’ summit of the Quad in Washington in September last year, the four member countries came forward with an ambitious space agenda. A working group was giving the task of advancing a number of key strategic areas, including the exchange of satellite data with the ambition to “protect the earth and its waters”.
Little progress on space matters was obvious in the public domain in the months following, until in the lead-up to the second in-person leaders’ summit in Tokyo this week the Financial Times reported that a new maritime initiative would emerge from the gathering. The initiative would look to curb illegal fishing in the Indo-Pacific by using satellite technology to connect existing systems in the region to create a comprehensive tracking system. A US official stated that “China was responsible for 95 per cent of illegal fishing in the region”.
The Quad Leaders’ Tokyo Summit Fact Sheet details this new Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA), “a near-real-time, integrated, and cost-effective maritime domain awareness picture”. It will look to harness commercially available data using existing technologies such as radio-frequency technologies. The Fact Sheet notes that due to its commercial origin, data will be unclassified, allowing the Quad to provide it to a wide range of partners who wish to benefit.
It would support the region in pushing back against the grey-zone incursions into foreign waters and the bullying of local fishing vessels.
One aim will be to identify so-called “black ships”, those vessels that turn-off usual tracking transponders to engage in illicit activity such as illegal fishing, smuggling or piracy. Fishing fleets from China in particular have increasingly troubled countries in the Indo-Pacific and similarly plundered waters around the world. In March 2021, Chinese fishing vessels were found anchored in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone and in one instance had rammed and sunk a Filipino fishing vessel. Sparking outrage from Ecuador, Chinese fleets have and been tracked to as far as the Galapagos and also stand accused of using “football stadium-style lighting” to plunder fisheries in shared waters between North Korea, Japan, and Russia.
The proliferation of earth observation and reconnaissance satellites make it now viable to track vessels that have turned off their transponders. As of 2022, there is an estimated to be about 5,700 operating satellites in space, with more are coming. In just the last year, more than 1,700 spacecraft and satellites went into orbit via 133 successful launches.
The IPMDA initiative would provide both environmental and security benefits to the region. Identifying China’s fleets would assist in levying faster attribution to their actions – it would support the region in pushing back against the grey-zone incursions into foreign waters and the bullying of local fishing vessels. Chinese ship have even been found not to be engaging in fishing, but instead encouraged financially to operate alongside Chinese law enforcement and military vessels to achieve political objectives in disputed waters.
The IPMDA should be strongly welcomed. It provides a substantive and a tangible action beyond the plethora of verbal commitments that emerge from other forums. It also builds on a bilateral agreements made by Quad member countries – it could also provide an avenue for integration with other countries interested in engaging with the Quad.
Another initiative announced at the Tokyo meeting was the opening of a “Quad Satellite Data Portal” that will look to aggregate links to respective national satellite data resources which can support efforts to build disaster resilience against the challenges posed by climate change.
However, the Quad can do more in the space realm. An opportunity exists to act on its commitment to “consult on norms and guidelines” for space and establish a Quad commitment to ban anti-satellite tests – as unilaterally announced by the United States in April this year. This kind of commitment would support discussions at a new UN Open Ended Working Group that seek to develop new norms for behaviour in space. Such a commitment by the Quad would show the value of “minilateral” mediums which are less constricted than larger groupings.
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