Via the World Economic Forum, a look at 11 innovations deepening our understanding of the ocean through data:
80% of our ocean remains unmapped, unobserved and unexplored.
That is why it is so important to deepen our understanding of the ocean through innovation.
UpLink and Friends of Ocean Action launched the Ocean Data Challenge, calling for solutions to boost ocean conservation and promote a sustainable blue economy.
11 winners have been selected and will become a part of the UpLink Innovation Network, gaining access to a mentoring programme and the World Economic Forum’s network and partners.
Humans now have the ability to observe and understand the Earth’s surface with astonishing accuracy. Be it monitoring carbon emissions from a single source, documenting war crimes in conflict zones, or leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to detect wildfires, one could be forgiven for thinking we know all there is to know about our planet. Yet in reality, the majority of our planet, the ocean, remains a ‘blue box’ in comparison with our terrestrial environment.
The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that “80% of our ocean is unmapped, unobserved and unexplored”. Such a dearth of ocean data limits our ability to account for the value of the ocean, to make wise ocean management decisions, and to protect and conserve our marine ecosystems from existing and emerging threats. This is why the High Level Panel for A Sustainable Ocean Economy has identified Ocean Knowledge as an essential area of transformation needed to sustainably manage the ocean.
Rising to the challenge of deepening our understanding of the ocean are innovations in sensors, satellites, artificial intelligence, autonomous underwater vehicles and more. Seeking to elevate the best of these innovators, UpLink & Friends of Ocean Action launched the Ocean Data Challenge, supported by the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory, Canada’s Ocean Supercluster, EMODnet, Fugro, HUB Ocean, Planet, The Economist Impact’s World Ocean Initiative, and Tidal | X – the Moonshot Factory. This challenge responded to the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development’s (UN Ocean Decade) call for the creation of a global ocean data ecosystem to connect businesses, organizations and government data providers.
The Ocean Data Challenge was a global call for start-ups and social enterprises that leverage and/or contribute to the global ocean data ecosystem and which demonstrate the applications for ocean data to boost ocean conservation and promote the sustainable blue economy. The identified innovators are working to advance our ocean knowledge in four important ways:
1. Advancing ocean data analytics
2. Generating community-level data and data designed to drive decisions
3. Developing commercial uses for public or open-source data resources
4. Building novel means of data collectionW-Sense has developed technology and data solutions enabling an “Internet of Underwater Things”. Their technology works with a wide range of sensors: up to 3000 meters data solutions permitting the operation of real-time monitoring networks across large areas, including multiple underwater assets.
Terradepth provides Ocean Data as a Service (ODaaS) beginning with their autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) through to data delivery on their custom, cloud-based user interface. Terradepth leverages its technology and data platforms to make the ocean “virtual”.
Ocean Data Network turns fishing vessels into ocean data miners, equipping fishing gear with IoT sensors. This low-cost, highly scalable model is addressing critical ocean data collection gaps, particularly in coastal areas.
Ellipsis Earth has developed an end-to-end, AI-based technology that can use imagery from multiple platforms (drones, cameras, etc) to identify and map environmental waste by type, weight, volume, impact, carbon footprint, material, brand and recycling value.
BioConsult and HiDef Aerial Surveying LTD have developed the SPACEWHALE service which uses satellite imagery at a .31m resolution and AI to significantly increase our ability to map and count whales globally. Their technology can even distinguish between species and identify juveniles and adults.
SINAY combines various sources of ocean and maritime data with AI through its Sinay Hub, generating valuable insights for maritime stakeholders including offshore energy, ports, and shipping companies. Sinay also monitors air, water, and noise pollution to predict the impact on biodiversity and assists companies in reducing their environmental footprints.
Jet Connectivity is bringing the power of 5G to the ocean. Their first-of-its-kind buoy platforms can accommodate a variety of sensors, cameras, radars, etc., and transmit large amounts of data at high speeds. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way and speed with which we collect, analyze and act on ocean data.
Planblue GMBH builds “underwater satellites” to generate highly detailed maps of the sea floor. With the assistance of machine learning, these maps can be augmented with precise estimates of the coverage and health of marine habitats like seagrass and coral.
Advanced Navigation seeks to create a “drone revolution” with its Hydrus underwater drone. This device features state-of-the-art maritime technology that, combined with its high portability and affordability, will make subsea robotics accessible to more people and companies than ever before.
BIOCEANOR combines the best of marine biology and data science to provide water quality insights that the aquaculture industry can use to optimize its operations. Their AquaReal service is the first in the world to provide advanced dissolved oxygen forecasting up to 48hrs in advance.
SeaSketch – is a powerful, unparalleled and open-source tool for ocean planning developed by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis based at the University of California Santa Barbara. SeaSketch allows communities of any scale to identify important or valuable ocean places, what they do (e.g., fish), how they do it (e.g., what gear), what they may extract (e.g., what species) and the relative value (monetary, spiritual, time spent) of each space they draw.
,
Read More »Via Smithsonian Magazine, a look at how researchers are using novel technologies to study polar bears, which live in the rapidly warming Arctic:
When they’re born, polar bears are toothless and blind, and they weigh roughly a pound. But over time—thanks to lots of fat-rich milk and protection from their mother—these helpless cubs grow to become large, powerful predators that are perfectly adapted for their Arctic environment. Though temperatures can dip to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, the massive marine mammals—which live in Canada, Norway, Russia, Greenland and Alaska—stay warm with a thick layer of body fat and two coats of fur. Their huge paws help them paddle through the icy water and gently walk across sea ice in search of their favorite meal, seals.
Their size, power, intelligence and environmental adaptions have long intrigued humans living in the north, including many Indigenous communities, such as the Inuit, the Ket and the Sámi. Biologists are curious about Ursus maritimus for many of the same reasons.
“Bears are fascinating,” says B.J. Kirschhoffer, director of conservation technology at Polar Bears International. “For me, when standing on a prominent point overlooking sea ice, I want to know how any animal can make a living in that environment. I am curious about everything that makes them able to grow to be the biggest bear by living in one of the harshest places on this planet. There is still so much to learn about the species—how they use energy, how they navigate their world and how they are responding to a rapidly changing environment.”
Today, researchers and conservationists want to know about these highly specialized marine mammals because human-caused climate change is reshaping their Arctic habitat. The bears spend much of their time on sea ice hunting for seals. But as temperatures in the Arctic rise, sea ice is getting thinner, melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. Pollution and commercial activity also threaten the bears and their environment. An estimated 26,000 polar bears roam the northern reaches of the world, and conservationists worry they could disappear entirely by 2100 because of global warming.
But investigating mostly solitary creatures who spend much of their time wandering around sea ice, in some of the most remote and rugged places on the planet, is expensive, logistically challenging and dangerous to researchers. For help, scientists are turning to technology. These five innovations are changing the way they study polar bears.
Sticky tracking devices
Researchers can twist three black bottle brushes into a sedated bear’s fur to attach a triangular plate equipped with a tracking device. 3M
Much of what scientists know about polar bears comes from tracking female members of the species. This is largely due to anatomical differences between the sexes: Males have small heads and thick necks, which means tracking collars can easily slip right off. Females, on the other hand, have larger heads and thinner necks.Neck collars are out of the question for males, and they’re not ideal for young bears, which can quickly outgrow the devices. Other options—like implants—require the bears to undergo minor surgery, which can be potentially risky to their health. Ear tags don’t require surgery, but they are still invasive. They’re also permanent, and polar bear researchers strive to make as minimal an impact on the bears as possible. How, then, can scientists attach tracking devices to young bears and male polar bears?
This was the challenge put to innovators at 3M, the Minnesota-based company that makes everything from medical devices to cleaning supplies to building materials. 3M is particularly good at making things sticky—its flagship products include Post-it Notes and Scotch Tape.
Jon Kirschhoffer spent his nearly 40-year career at 3M as an industrial designer, developing novel solutions to complex problems just like this one. So when B.J. Kirschhoffer, his son, started chatting about the need for a new, noninvasive way of attaching trackers to polar bears, Jon’s wheels started turning. He brought the problem to his colleagues, who set to work studying polar bear fur and building prototypes.
Crimping Device For Polar Bear Fur
One of the most promising designs draws inspiration from the human process of attaching hair extensions. 3M
In the end, they landed on two promising “burr on fur” approaches. One device uses three bottle brushes—small, tubular brushes with a long handle made of twisted metal wire that could fit inside the neck of a skinny bottle—to grab onto clumps of a sedated bear’s fur. They also have the option of applying a two-part epoxy to the bottle brushes to help hold the bear’s fur more securely. Scientists and wildlife managers can use the brushes to firmly attach a triangular plate that contains a tracking device between the animal’s shoulder blades. In tests, the researchers have sedated the animals before attaching the trackers, but some zoos are training their bears to accept the tags while fully alert.“It’s like a burr: You twist and entangle the fur in the bottle brush, then bend over the handle so it doesn’t untwist,” Jon says. “We do that on three sides and put a little protective cap over it so it’s less likely to get snagged on willows and brush and other things that bears walk through.”
The other option draws inspiration from the process hair stylists use to attach hair extensions to their human clients’ heads. This pentagonal design involves extending a loop of a fishing leader down through five metal ferrules, or tubes; lassoing some hair on a sedated polar bear; and pulling it back through. Scientists can then use pliers to squeeze and crimp the hair in place.
Researchers are testing both devices on wild bears in Churchill, Manitoba, and on bears housed at zoos and aquariums. The verdict is still out on which option is better, and Polar Bears International expects the testing phase to last several more years. Ultimately, by making design modifications based on their experimental learnings, they hope to tweak the devices so they will stick to the bears’ fur for at least 270 days, which is the lifespan of the tracking devices themselves.
But even if they can’t get the sticky devices to stay attached to bears for the full 270 days, the gadgets will still be useful for gathering some amount of data on males and young bears, which is currently lacking. They’re also promising for short-term tracking situations, such as “when a bear has entered a community, been captured and released, and we want to monitor the animal to ensure it doesn’t re-enter the community,” says B.J.
“Bear-dar” detection systems
Radar Tower For Detecting Polar Bears
Scientists are testing several radar systems designed to detect approaching polar bears. Erinn Hermsen / Polar Bears International
When humans and polar bears meet, the encounters can often end in tragedy—for either the bear, the human or both. Conflict doesn’t happen often, but global warming is complicating the issue. Because climate change is causing sea ice to form later in the fall and melt earlier in the spring, the bears are fasting longer. And, with nowhere else to go, they’re also spending more time on land in the Arctic, where an estimated four million humans live. Some are even seeking out easy calories from garbage dumps or piles of butchered whale remains.Scientists counted 73 reports of wild polar bears attacking humans around the world between 1870 to 2014, which resulted in 20 human deaths and 63 human injuries. (They didn’t include bear outcomes in the study.) After analyzing the encounters, researchers determined that thin or skinny adult male bears in below-average body condition posed the greatest threats to humans. Female bears, meanwhile, rarely attacked and typically only did so while defending their cubs.
To prevent human-bear encounters, scientists are developing early-warning radar detection systems they’ve nicknamed “bear-dar” to help alert northern communities when a bear is getting close. A handful of promising prototypes are in the works: Some teams of researchers are building the systems from scratch, while others are riffing off technologies that are already in use by the military. They all use artificial intelligence models that may be able to discern approaching bears. Scientists have tested the systems in Churchill, Manitoba, and are now tweaking the A.I. models to be more accurate.
“We’ve already established that the radar sees everything,” B.J. Kirschhoffer says in a statement. “Being able to see is not the problem. Filtering out the noise is the problem. … Ideally, we can train them to identify polar bears with a high degree of certainty.”
As the systems are still in testing, they do not alert members of the community or professional responders. But, eventually, communities may develop custom responses depending on the alerts, says Kirschhoffer.
“For instance, if a bear-like target is identified 200 meters out, send a text message,” he says. “If a bear-like target is identified 50 meters out, blink a red light and sound a siren.”
Synthetic aperture radar
Scientists are highly interested in polar bear dens—that is, the cozy nooks female bears dig under the snow to give birth to cubs—for several reasons. Denning, which occurs each year from December to early April, is the most vulnerable time in the life of youngsters and mothers. Though they’re accustomed to covering huge amounts of territory to find prey, mother bears hunker down for the entire denning period to protect their cubs from the Arctic elements and predators. Studying bears at den sites allows researchers to gather important behavioral and population insights, such as the body condition of mothers and cubs or how long they spend inside the den before emerging.
Scientists also want to know where dens are located because oil and gas companies can inadvertently disturb the dens—and, thus, potentially harm the bears—when they search for new sources of fossil fuels. If researchers and land managers know where polar bear dens are located, they can tell energy companies to steer clear.
But finding polar bear dens on the snowy, white, blustery tundra is a lot like finding a needle in a haystack. Historically, scientists have used low-tech methods to find dens, such as heading out on cross-country skis with a pair of binoculars or using dogs to sniff them out. But those options were often inefficient and ineffective, not to mention rough on the researchers. For the last few years, scientists have been using a technology known as forward-looking infrared imagery, or FLIR, which involves using heat-sensing cameras attached to an aircraft to detect the warm bodies of bears under the snow. But FLIR is finicky and only works in near-perfect weather—too much wind, sun or blowing snow basically renders it useless. What’s more, if the den roof is too thick, the technology can’t pick up the heat inside. Tom Smith, a plant and wildlife scientist at Brigham Young University, estimates that aerial FLIR surveys are 45 percent effective, which is far from ideal.
But a promising new technology is on the horizon: synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Affixed to an aircraft, SAR is a sophisticated remote-sensing technology that sends out electromagnetic waves, then records the bounce back, to produce a radar image of the landscape below. SAR is not constrained by the same weather-related issues as FLIR, and it can capture a huge swath of land, up to half a mile wide, at a time, according to Smith.
Scientists are still testing SAR, but, in theory, they hope to use it to create a baseline map of an area during the summer or early fall, then do another flyover during denning season. They can then compare the two images to see what’s changed.
“You can imagine, with massive computing power, it goes through and says, ‘These objects were not in this image before,’” says Smith.
Artificial intelligence
Getting an accurate headcount of polar bears over time gives scientists valuable insights into the species’ well-being amid environmental changes spurred by climate change. But polar bears roam far and wide, traveling across huge expanses of sea ice and rugged, hard-to-reach terrain in very cold environments, which makes it challenging, as well as potentially dangerous and expensive, for scientists to try to count them in the field. As a result, researchers have taken to the skies, looking for the bears while aboard aircraft or via satellites flying over their habitat. After snapping thousands of aerial photos or satellite images taken from space, they can painstakingly pore over the pictures in search of bears.
A.I. may eventually help them count the animals. Scientists are now training A.I. models to quickly and accurately recognize polar bears, as well as other species of marine mammals, in photos captured from above. For researchers who conduct aerial surveys, which produce hundreds of thousands of photos that scientists sift through, this new technology is a game-changer.
“If you’re spending eight hours a day looking through images, the amount of attention that a human brain is going to pay to those images is going to fluctuate, whereas when you have a computer do something … it’s going to do that consistently,” Erin Moreland, a research zoologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Alaska Public Media’s Casey Grove in 2020. “People are good at this, but they’re not as good at it as a machine, and it’s not necessarily the best use of a human mind.”
To that same end, researchers are also now testing whether drones work to capture high-resolution images and gather other relevant data. Since they don’t require onboard human pilots, drones are a safer, more affordable alternative to helicopters; they’re also smaller and nimbler, and tend to be less disruptive to wildlife.
Treadmill and swim chamber
Researchers want to understand how much polar bears exert themselves while walking across the tundra or swimming through the Arctic Ocean. To get a handle on the marine mammals’ energy output on land, Anthony Pagano, a biologist with the United States Geological Survey, built a special heavy-duty polar bear treadmill. Study collaborators at the San Diego Zoo and the Oregon Zoo then trained captive polar bears to walk on it. Using shatterproof plastic and reinforced steel, the team constructed a 10-foot-long chamber that encased a treadmill typically used by horses. The 4,400-pound contraption also included a circular opening where researchers could tempt the bears into walking with fish and other tasty treats.
As a follow-up to the walking study, Pagano and biologists at the Oregon Zoo also measured the energy output of the bears while swimming. To do so, they developed a polar bear-sized swim chamber, complete with a small motor that generated waves to simulate the conditions the bears might encounter in the ocean.
Together, the two technologies helped scientists learn that bears expend more energy swimming than walking. Polar bears are good swimmers, but they’re not very efficient ones, thanks to their relatively short arms, their non-aerodynamic body shape and their propensity for swimming at the water’s surface, where drag is greatest. In a world with shrinking sea ice, polar bears likely need to swim more to find food and, thus, will burn precious calories, which could cause them to lose weight and lower their chances of reproducing—decreasing the species’ chances of survival.
Together, these and other technologies are helping researchers learn how polar bears are faring as the climate evolves. This knowledge, in turn, informs conservation decisions to help protect the bears and their environment—and the health of the planet more broadly.
“We need to understand more about how the Arctic ecosystem is changing and how polar bears are responding to loss of habitat if we are going to keep them in the wild,” says B.J. Kirschhoffer. “Ultimately, our fate is tied to the polar bear’s. Whatever actions we take to help polar bears keep their sea ice habitat intact are actions that will help humans protect our own future.”
,
Read More »Via The Conversation, a look at how tracking technology is transforming our understanding of animal behavior:
Biologging is the practice of attaching devices to animals so that scientific data can be collected. For decades, basic biologgers have been used to relay physiological data including an animal’s heart rate or body temperature. But now, new technologies are affording scientists a more advanced insight into the behaviour of animals as they move through their natural environment undisturbed.
The tracking of individual animals also provides access to remote locations that are difficult to study. In particular, science has only a limited knowledge of marine environments – the surface of the moon has been mapped and studied more extensively than our own ocean floor.
But researchers have recently fitted small video cameras to the dorsal fins of tiger sharks in the Bahamas. The footage led to the discovery of the world’s largest known seagrass ecosystem, and has extended the total known seagrass coverage by more than 40%. Seagrass ecosystems are important carbon stores, home to thousands of marine species, and can provide a buffer against coastal erosion. Conservationists are now better placed to protect these important ecosystems as a result of biologging.
Here are four more examples of humans working with animals – from dragonflies and ospreys to hedgehogs and jaguars – to improve our understanding of wildlife behaviour and numbers around the world, and how best to protect them.
1. Hedgehog protection
Rural hedgehog populations in Britain declined by up to 75% between 1981 and 2020. Conservationists require more information on their movement and behaviour to inform future efforts to protect this endangered species.Between 2016 and 2019, 52 hedgehogs were fitted with GPS trackers programmed to record the location of the hedgehog every five minutes throughout the night. The tracking data indicated that male hedgehogs travelled longer distances than females, and would often move several kilometres to find a mate. Male hedgehogs are therefore more vulnerable to road mortality. Research like this can inform strategies such as building wildlife tunnels that enable hedgehogs to bypass busy roads.
Tracking data has also revealed that rural hedgehogs travel further each night in search of food than urban hedgehogs. This highlights the importance of urban gardens as a hedgehog habitat, and supports the use of hedgehog tunnels to connect gardens.
These studies used GPS trackers that store data on the device, meaning each animal had to be recaptured to retrieve the information. This is fine for animals such as hedgehogs that do not roam far, but it can be a challenge when studying migratory animal species.
2. Osprey migration
Scientists studied birds prior to biologging by fitting them with wing tags so they could be identified individually from a distance. But information about their location relied on researchers repeatedly finding the same bird.Ospreys are migratory birds of prey that feed primarily on fish. They were persecuted into extinction in the UK in the 1800s, before being reintroduced to England in 1996. However, the absence of accurate data regarding ospreys’ movement has made it difficult to identify their wintering grounds and migratory stopover sites.
Two UK conservation charities, the RSPB and the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation, began osprey satellite tracking projects around 2007. Data on an osprey’s location, orientation, altitude and speed has provided researchers with information about their migration routes and wintering grounds.
Such information has aided measures to protect ospreys throughout their migratory range. These include education programmes to inspire young conservationists in the UK and Gambia, countries at opposite ends of an osprey’s migratory pathway.
Biologging has also unveiled peculiarities in the behaviour of ospreys. For example, one bird was found to have hitched a ride on cargo ships during its annual migration.
3. Flying insects
Biologging devices are generally large to account for a battery. So while attaching them to larger animals is relatively straightforward, studying insects has required the development of miniature devices.Insects are among the world’s smallest flying migrants – monarch butterflies and green darner dragonflies migrate south from Canada to the US each year. Researchers fitted small automated radio transmitters (weighing less than 300mg) to these insects.
Their movement over long distances was then monitored through a network of more than 1,500 automated receiver towers spread across the American continent. The towers record the biologgers within a 10km proximity.
The data revealed that the insects travelled distances of up to 143km each day at speeds of over 20 metres per second. This exceeded known daily travelling distances for the darner dragonfly. Warmer temperatures and wind assistance also allowed the insects to migrate at a faster pace.
4. Tracking from space
The Icarus project involves researchers attaching transmitters to a variety of animal species. These transmitters send data to a receiver in space which then transmits the information back to a ground station, from where it is sent to relevant researchers.This reduces the delay for data processing and device relocation, and allows the immediate availability of behavioural and physiological data on a global scale. Since March 2021, the project has tracked the movements of 15 species worldwide, including the Saiga Antelope, fruit bats and Jaguars.
The information can be used to predict the impacts of environmental change. Identifying which habitat types are selected or avoided can reveal the most productive habitats for endangered species. The behavioural response of animals to ecological changes, such as a warmer Arctic, can also be monitored.
Data from the project may allow scientists to use certain animal species to predict disaster events. For example, research has found that some animals exhibited behavioural changes immediately before Japan’s 2011 earthquake.
Icarus researchers also suggest that disease transmission hotspots could be identified using biologgers, which could help to map the spread of viruses.
Biologging has allowed for the protection of various animal species and environments by widening our knowledge of animal behaviour. But remote animal tracking may also allow humanity to be better protected from natural disasters in the future.
,
Read More »Via Futurity, a report on how new wearable sensors for dolphins could reveal the cost of human disturbances in marine habitats:
Human disturbances in dolphin habitat include climate change, overfishing, and noise pollution from construction, oil exploration, and navy sonar activity. These disturbances can interrupt important animal behavior like foraging for fish and socializing, but measuring disturbance is difficult under water.
Devices very similar to fitness trackers used by humans—known as biologging tags—are used in biology research but estimating the energetic cost of swimming has been challenging. With custom biologging tags, the engineers now are able to measure animal movement during thousands of strokes as they swim.
“Our goal is to use tag data to estimate foraging events, how many fish were consumed during a day, and connect that to estimates of how much energy dolphins use during the movement required to catch those fish,” says Alex Shorter, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and senior author of a paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology on the work.
“This is important for conservation because we can then use our approach to estimate energetic costs when these animals are disturbed.”
In the new work, the researchers developed estimates of energetic cost from tag data by working with their human and animal collaborators at Dolphin Quest Oahu. In that environment, the researchers could conduct repeatable swimming trials over a range of speeds from multiple animals to generate the data they needed to estimate how much energy the animals used as they swam. Marine mammal specialists trained the dolphins to wear the tracker during lap trials and periods of free swimming.
The tag sits between the blowhole and dorsal fin of the dolphin, attached with suction cups, where it noninvasively measures speed, temperature, pressure, and movement. Six dolphins participated in the work, and just as in data collection with humans, the animals were free to decline to participate in the work at any time.
During the prescribed lap trials, the animals started from rest at a floating dock and swam an 80-meter lap underwater around one of the marine mammal specialists and back to the dock at speeds of up to 21 kilometers per hour (13 miles per hour). During free swimming, in which the dolphins received no instructions, tags tracked movement for periods that ranged from 9.5 to 24 hours. One of the dolphins tracked for a 24-hour period swam over 70 kilometers (43.5 miles), and these data were used for a case study of daily activity and energetic cost for a bottlenose dolphin. Importantly, these findings can extend to tag data from animals in the wild.
“Our tag-based method is universally applicable to both animals in managed and wild settings, and can lead to a host of new research in monitoring the physical well-being of dolphin populations, which in turn will inform how we as humans are affecting their travel patterns, feeding requirements and lives in general,” says Joaquin Gabaldon, a postdoctoral researcher in robotics and first author of the study.
“From a technological perspective, it is our hope that other researchers see the potential of dedicated on-tag speed sensing, and pursue the development of more adaptable speed sensors to enable energetics monitoring for a wider variety of marine animals,” Gabaldon says.
Collaborators at Loggerhead Instruments, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and Aarhus University in Denmark contributed to making the sensors.
The study had support from the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and the University of Michigan.
,
Read More »Via The Washington Post, an article on a scientist who uses drones and algorithms to save whales — and the rest of the ocean:
Just yards from the Fish 1, a 22-foot research vessel, a humpback whale about twice the size of the boat hurled itself out of the water, sending shimmering droplets in a broken necklace of splash.
In the other direction, a hulking cargo ship, stacked high with containers, crept closer.
Aboard the Fish 1, a slight figure whose face is crinkled from years in the sun and saltwater, looked from one to the other. Ocean scientist Douglas McCauley wanted to see whether the near real-time detection system he and his colleagues had developed, Whale Safe, could avert collisions between whales and ships in the Santa Barbara Channel.
The tool represents one of the ways McCauley, who heads the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California Santa Barbara, is working to protect the ocean even as it becomes more industrialized. By collecting data from several sources — an acoustic monitoring buoy that listens for whale songs, identifies them according to species with an algorithm and sends that information to satellites; a predictive habitat model for blue whales; and sightings logged in an app — Whale Safe forecasts to ships the chances of meeting a whale. Then, it grades shipping companies on whether they actually slow down to 10 knots or less during whale migrations, from May 1 to Dec. 15.
“We can literally watch all of the ships in California and across the whole ocean; we are better positioned than ever before to try to track damage as it occurs, or before it occurs,” McCauley said a few days later in a Zoom call from the French Polynesian island of Moorea, where he is spending a month researching coral reefs. “We are in trouble if we don’t do something different, and I realized that if I kept sticking my head literally underwater or stayed in the lab, these problems weren’t going to fix themselves.”
Humans have worked in the seas for centuries: fishing, seafaring and more recently, drilling for oil and gas and the development of offshore wind farms. Shipping lanes cross almost every surface of the sea, except for shrinking swaths of the Southern and Arctic Ocean.
But as development has intensified and the planet has warmed, the 43-year-old McCauley has ventured into the gray area between scientific research and advocacy to try to fix these problems — or at least make them visible.
He is trying to save the whales; collect plastic; explore the links between climate change, overfishing and nutrition in the South Pacific; warn about the dangers of seabed mining; track sharks using drones and artificial intelligence; and calculate the benefits to people, animals and the planet that come from protecting broad swaths of the sea.
“One of Doug’s compelling traits as a scientist is that he is keen to explore outside the box,” said Benjamin Halpern, a UCSB professor of marine biology and ocean conservation who has worked with McCauley for about a decade. “He is a very creative thinker, and able to think differently about the solutions to problems and what kinds of research and science can help inform those.”
[These whales are on the brink. Now comes climate change — and wind power]
In meetings with corporate executives and political leaders, McCauley has made a consistent argument: Protecting the sea is in our interest, since it already does a lot of the work for us.
In 2020 McCauley led a report that provided a framework for marine protected areas on the high seas, finding that such refuges could be powerful tools for biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and climate resilience. Even port and fishing communities, he argued, depend on an ocean that is still wild and alive.
“We have a globally unique chance to talk about this before it’s too late,” he said.
The encounter in late September, amid one of the world’s busiest shipping channels and a vibrant ecosystem, offered a glimpse of how to do just that. Minutes after the container ship had passed McCauley’s boat, the whale — possibly the same one, but it is hard to tell — had found another, and the two sent up exhales of spray.
It was as if a bulldozer operator had plowed through a herd of elephants without stopping, not too far from a major city’s downtown, hoping to avoid a crash. And it happens many times a day here in the Santa Barbara Channel, even though barely anyone sees it.
While McCauley tracks these interactions, much of the public seems to have noticed this industrial shift underwater.
Since 2000, global container port traffic has nearly quadrupled; aquaculture produces more than half of the fish we eat; about 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the oceans every year; over half the global oceans are fished; more than 700,000 miles of undersea data cables snake across the ocean floor; seabed mining may soon begin in some of the world’s last pristine ecosystems; and the fishing industry is beginning to target deep ocean life.
The ocean is, by far, the world’s largest carbon sink, having absorbed about 40 percent of the excess greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels. But it comes at a cost: more acidic and warmer waters, which may not soak up as much carbon going forward. The fact that ocean animals evolved to a narrow range of conditions, McCauley and others found, makes them more vulnerable to climate change.
The landscape was less crowded when McCauley grew up in Lomita, Calif., and went to school in San Pedro, not far from the ports and the channel. He could see whale migrations out the window of his high school geometry class. From an early age, he would ride his bike to the beach as an escape, and “all of a sudden, I was in a super wild place.”
He spent much of his adolescence and early adulthood working at the local public aquarium, and working on fishing boats.
It was there, catching squid at 1 a.m. to sell as bait, hauling in a croaker bigger than he was, and watching people spend $20 a day to go out a boat to catch dinner for their families, that he saw how a thriving ocean economy works.
It was later, in his career as a scientist, that he had data to explain what he learned through experience: What is good for the ocean is also good for people, and possibly business too. Slowing down ships means fewer ship strikes, which means more whales. That is good for biodiversity and climate change: Whales themselves are carbon sinks and fertilize plant growth (another carbon sink). It also means cleaner air for those who live nearby, and fewer carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
He and others developed WhaleSafe, he said, after shipping companies asked: “These are the biggest mammals on the planet. Can’t you tell us when they’re there so we don’t run into them?”
Three shipping companies contacted for this article, as well as an industry association, said that they supported such programs. CMA CGM, among the world’s largest shipping container companies, is sending alerts above medium directly to their captains, and Hyundai Heavy Industries is working with Whale Safe to incorporate its data directly onboard new ships.
But some of the firms tracked by the tool, which has recently expanded its use to include San Francisco, have received F grades. Matson Navigation, for example, only slowed down roughly 18 percent of the time.
Lee Kindberg, the head of environment and sustainability for Maersk, which received a B for slowing down in about 79 percent of cases, said the company supports Whale Safe. But she added that shippers must balance safety and speed restrictions against weather and demands from companies — and their customers — who want everything faster.
And, as climate change scrambles whales’ migration patterns and schedules, tools like Whale Safe may become even more essential in protecting them, McCauley said.
Trying to prevent ship strikes, one of the leading causes of whale deaths, is becoming an emergency. Three of the past four years rank as the deadliest on record for whales on the West Coast — about 80 annually — but the death toll is probably much higher, since most sink to the ocean floor. There have been no known ship strikes in the Santa Barbara Channel since the launch of Whale Safe in 2020, though it is too early to make a causal link.
A moored acoustic monitoring buoy near the Channel Islands in California. Santa Cruz Island is in the distance.
While aboard the Fish 1, McCauley pulled on a wet suit, flippers and a mask and jumped into the water to inspect the buoy. Looking not unlike one of the sea lions who popped up nearby with his slick outer layer and whiskers poking out beneath his mask, he scrubbed it for barnacles, and made sure all of the hardware was in good condition.Like the buoys, McCauley seems to be able to take in information, translate it into languages its recipients understand and make it actionable, according to Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist who has worked with McCauley and now serves as deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
“He is adept at boiling something down to the most important components and expressing his knowledge in an accessible fashion, and he is passionate about solutions,” she said in an email.
“Doug does seem quite nimble and effective at engaging with the private sector, and I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing,” Halpern said. “Maybe it’s valuable that someone is testing those waters, because we can’t solve the climate change catastrophe we face without engaging the private sector and corporations.”
McCauley spreads his message with a billionaire’s help. Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne decided to fund an ocean science lab after reading a landmark study he co-authored on the ocean’s industrialization. McCauley serves as the lab’s director, and the university has received $88 million from the Benioffs since 2016.
Since then, their conversations about the ocean and “carbon math” have shaped much of Benioff’s climate and environmental philanthropy, including the “Trillion Trees” tree-planting initiative. “By aligning with Doug on the ocean, we found a bigger vision on the climate,” Benioff said in a Zoom interview.
McCauley said he is aware that some might question engaging with private philanthropists and industry, but argued that he and others could not afford to wait for federal funding — and action. “We don’t have the luxury of time.”
The boat approaches the buoy. McCauley prepares to check and clean the buoy. McCauley steadies himself as he works on the buoy.
Over the past few years, McCauley has tried to make that decision-enabling data available and legible to policymakers across the globe.Alongside a group of other scientists, McCauley has worked in Kiribati to document how damage to coral reefs from climate change and overfishing harms the diet and health of country’s inhabitants, who depend on fish for essential nutrients. The researchers share that data with government officials to show which islands are most at risk.
McCauley is also tackling the issue of deep seabed mining, which could begin in international waters as soon as next year. McCauley and the Benioff Ocean Science Lab have tried to map potential excavation sites across the globe, since the public remains largely unaware of this development, its scope and its possible threats.
[How protecting the ocean can save species and fight climate change]
At the bottom of the ocean around the world lie significant deposits of metals, including some needed for electric vehicle batteries and other clean energy projects. Some companies see ocean deposits as key to this clean energy transition, and are jockeying for primacy in this prospective new industry.
Along with more than 400 other scientists, McCauley signed a statement last year arguing that deep-sea mining will result in “loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning that would be irreversible on multigenerational time scales.” They argued that there are still too many unknowns in the deep ocean to mine them responsibly.
McCauley helped bring together leaders from environmental nonprofits and businesses to discuss the risks of seabed mining. Afterward, other advocates successfully worked to pressure Google, BMW, Volvo, Samsung and others to support a moratorium.
But industry officials such as the Metals Company CEO Gerard Barron counter that deep-sea mining opponents are ignoring the trade-offs that come from keeping the ocean off limits.
“While saying ‘No’ to something is easy,” said Barron, who heads a seabed mining corporation, “finding a solution is hard and if we fail to consider all our options, we will consign our biodiverse rainforests and carbon sinks to further destruction, increase our emissions load, and further damage the oceans Douglas has set out to protect.”
McCauley, by contrast, sees these planetary puzzle pieces as interlocked. Stopping seabed mining might mean less ocean noise, which might mean more whales, which means more stored carbon, which might mean fewer forest fires in his native California, or less sea-level rise in Kiribati.
Sometimes it is impossible for McCauley to ignore how climate change has changed his surroundings. He recently took a group of students to the woods near Santa Barbara to learn about the carbon cycle, but had difficulty teaching the lesson because almost all of the trees around them had died of drought, beetle infestation, or forest fire.
“I have too real a sense of how bad things are going to get with climate in such a short amount of time,” he said.
Still, he manages to marvel at the natural world, and the mysteries it holds.
Back aboard the Fish 1, not long after the container ship — and an oil tanker — had passed by, one of the whales came right underneath the boat. It surfaced briefly about 10 feet away, flicking its tail and disappearing.
Later, over Zoom, McCauley reflected on that moment: “I have no good explanation for why a whale would swim under the boat and look up at us, other than that it can.
“Some piece of that is a reminder that they deserve a space on the planet because they are incredibly intelligent, incredibly complex and sophisticated animals, and wonder about us as much as we wonder about them.”
,
Read More »Via the U.S. Naval Institute, commentary on the potential – via use of a crowdsourcing platform – the world’s fishermen can become a martime sensor network to counter illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing:
As a topic, illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing needs little introduction. The U.S. Coast Guard Commandant’s 2020 Strategic Outlook stated that IUU fishing “has replaced piracy as the leading global maritime security threat.”1 Indiscriminate IUU fishing techniques, such as drift net release and dynamite detonation, result in annual losses of $37 billion to maritime nations.2 Besides monetary losses, IUU fishing deprives indigenous coastal communities of needed sustenance, which increases poverty and the risk of low-intensity conflict.
Coincidentally, China is one of the world’s worst IUU fishing offenders. Furthermore, China has outfitted its industrial fishing fleet with hardware and collection capabilities that make its boats paramilitary maritime forces. It is a matter of national security to track and interdict these long-ranging fishing vessels, but thus far the U.S. Coast Guard has been unable to field a technology that offers sufficient density of coverage and microfidelity.
A Math Problem Satellites Cannot Solve
Tracking the Chinese fishing fleet largely amounts to a math problem. There currently are an estimated 17,000 high-endurance Chinese fishing vessels capable of operating both as swarms and as dispersed entities.3 Spreading these vessels out over the millions of square miles of other nations’ exclusive economic zones (EEZ) leads to a quintessential needle in the haystack problem.Existing tracking efforts rely heavily on “eye in the sky” technologies that find and ping Chinese fishing boats, where the data is then processed by specialized AI companies. These technologies can be broken into five buckets (see Figure 1) and boast impressive capabilities, but capability gaps remain (see Figure 2).
The Coast Guard has championed orbital technologies, as seen in the Defense Innovation Unit’s recent X3View challenge.4 However, the Coast Guard should also investigate prototyping and deploying low-cost crowdsourced data platforms to provide “ground truths” in addition to these overhead collections.
An Agile Solution
Crowdsourced data platforms should be publicly available, compatible with low-end smartphones, and free to use. Local fishermen can then report Chinese vessels engaging in IUU activities in those fishermen’s sovereign waters. Reports could be broadcasted back to other platform users, the partner nation coast guard (if applicable), and the U.S. Coast Guard. The most analogous way to think of such a platform would be like the driving app Waze, but instead of reporting traffic or speed traps, fishermen would report Chinese vessels engaging in IUU fishing.This nonstandard intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) could greatly augment the Coast Guard’s detection abilities when employed as a tip-and-cue model. A fisherman’s report would be the “tip,” which allows the Coast Guard to direct private satellite, synthetic-aperture radar (SAR), or radio-frequency operators to “cue” their satellites onto specific patches of ocean. Consistently generating tasking for space assets is far more efficient than sweeping large swaths of the ocean and hoping to get a cold hit. Given the number of fishermen in the Indo-Pacific, this form of ISR would have incredible density of coverage.
Furthermore, if the reports included pictures, then the Coast Guard could obtain valuable amplifying data, such as hull number and cargo on deck. Space assets cannot easily discern hull numbers or draft. In the longer run, data collected by such a platform could be combined with weather and overhead collections to build predictive models of where the Chinese fishing fleet will operate each month.
A crowdsourced platform also could be used in the information operations domain. Pictures and videos of the Chinese fishing fleet employing outlawed fishing practices could be used in press releases to emphasize China’s flagrant violations of good maritime stewardship. Interviews with fishermen in the Philippines reveal that they detest the Chinese fishing fleet presence yet feel like many of their fellow countrymen are unaware of their plight.8 Uniting local seafaring communities via technology would have additional positive effects.
Multiple Proceedings authors have discussed the need to address China’s gray-zone tactics with counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics.9 COIN relies heavily on a positive rapport between blue forces and the local populace. Providing maritime communities with free technology that makes their time at sea safer and more productive would be a good first step in building such a rapport.
The biggest challenge would be getting the fishermen to use the platform and make reports. For starters, the platform would be simple to use and free to download. Once downloaded, a fisherman could view the last known position of hostile Chinese vessels. This is highly valuable since an encounter with Chinese fishing vessels often results in the local fishermen getting their nets cut or vessels rammed.10 And by making reports, a fisherman would indirectly help their comrades avoid unexpected encounters with the Chinese fleet.
The use of crowdsourcing in a contested environment is not unprecedented; during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian civilians have increasingly used crowdsourcing applications to report the movements of Russian Army forces.11 The Philippine Navy has had limited success in getting Filipino fishermen to report Chinese maritime militia vessels over via radio, but expressed a need for a more centralized mobile platform.12
Technical Merit and Cost
It is relatively easy to develop a crowdsourced platform. Dozens of such apps exist, although this specific platform would have to be custom built to function offline.13 Basic security and encryption would be essential, and it also would be wise to not require fishermen to include personal identification information (other than an email) when creating an account. Sending the reports’ metadata to an established server provider such as Amazon Web Services would further increase the data’s security and ability to be integrated with Coast Guard dashboards. Back-end quality assurance/quality control programs would serve as filters if China tried to flood the platform with misleading reports.While space-based assets cost millions of dollars to launch and operate, a crowdsourcing platform could be built for $100,000 and maintained for even less. A team of Stanford University students working on a similar Hacking 4 Defense project were able to field a maritime domain awareness minimum viable product for only $20,000. Making the platform compatible with smartphones would remove the need for custom-built hardware and drive costs down. Furthermore, the potential user base is immense.
Deployment
The U.S. Coast Guard specializes in building partnerships with fishing communities and fisheries enforcement agencies, both domestically and internationally. Once the first version of the platform is built and beta tested, the Coast Guard should showcase it to partner nations. Since the platform would be easy to use, training would take a matter of minutes. Countries most affected by Chinese IUU fishing—such as Ecuador, the Philippines, Micronesia, and Fiji—already have established relations with the U.S. Coast Guard, making institutional buy-in all the easier.Looking Forward
IUU fishing is a problem for the entire Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.14 However, the Coast Guard is best positioned to take on the challenge. To make maritime domain awareness (MDA) more robust, the Coast Guard should prototype a simple crowdsourced MDA platform, which does not have the upfront cost of exquisite surveillance assets. Such a platform would improve the Coast Guard’s capability to interdict Chinese IUU fishing, while simultaneously mobilizing local communities. For years, the act of exposing IUU fishing has largely been done by governments and a few specialized non-governmental organizations. The scope of the problem now demands an all-hands-on-deck effort that incorporates simple reporting by concerned and impacted local watermen.1. U.S. Coast Guard, Illegal, Underreported, and Unregulated Fishing Strategic Outlook, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, September 2020.
2. “Illegal Fishing,” World Wildlife Foundation, 2022, www.worldwildlife.org/.
3. Ian Urbina, “How China’s Expanding Fishing Fleet Is Depleting the World’s Oceans,” Yale Environment 360, 17 August 2020.
4. “U.S. Government and Nonprofit Organization Host Prize Competition to Leverage the Latest Technology to Detect and Defeat Illegal Fishing,” Defense Innovation Unit, 22 July 2021
5. Uday Govindswamy, Planet Labs, interviewed by author, 26 March 2020.
6. Michael Boito, et al., “Metrics to Compare Aircraft Operating and Support Costs in the Department of Defense,” RAND Corporation, 2015.
7. Brendon Providence, Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, U.S. Department of Transportation, interviewed by author, 10 March 2020.
8. Joyce Hufton, Coral Movement, interviewed by the author, 13 December 2020; Yoyong Suarez, IMPL Project, interviewed by the author, 6 June 2020; and Dr. Francisco Buencamino, Tuna Canners Association of the Philippines, interviewed by the author, 25 March 2020.
9. Hunter Stires, “The South China Sea Needs a ‘COIN’ Toss,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 145, no. 5 (May 2019); and 2ndLt Robert German, USMC, “The Other Side of COIN,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 147, no. 2 (February 2021).
10. Anonymous U.S. Army Green Beret, interviewed by the author, 18 December 2020.
11. Drew Harwell, “Instead of Consumer Software, Ukraine Tech Workers Build Apps of War,” The Washington Post, 24 March 2022.
12. CDR Cyrus Mendoza, Philippine Navy, interviewed by the author, 13 January 2021.
13. Marguerite Reardon, “Can Dataless Smartphones Still Use GPS Navigation Apps?” CNET, 13 March 2013.
14. Dr. Joseph Felter, Stanford University, Hoover Institute, interviewed by author, 10 March 2020; CAPT Michael O’Hara, USN, U.S. Naval War College, interviewed by author, 19 June 2020; COL Leo Liebreich, U.S. Army, interviewed by author, 29 May 2020; and CAPT Chris Sharman, USN, interviewed by author, 5 March 2020.
,
Read More »