December 19th, 2015
Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, an interesting article on conservation technologist Shah Selbe’s use of data and drones to protect the planet:
Mr. Selbe, a Jacques Cousteau fan who grew up snorkeling and scuba-diving near Riverside, Calif., was looking for innovative ways to use technology to protect the planet. That is what he’s been doing ever since—while keeping his rocket-science day job at Boeing, which hired him straight out of college.
A self-described “conservation technologist,” Mr. Selbe, 33, combines mobile technology, satellite data and drones to better protect the environment. Used together, “these devices can watch over areas in ways that no single person could ever do,” he says.
As a graduate student at Stanford University, Mr. Selbe created an open-source, low-cost platform to pull data from satellites, drones and other monitoring systems to help identify illegal and unregulated fishing in the world’s oceans—a problem that preoccupies conservationists, who warn that overfishing could lead to a crash in world-wide fish stocks in the next three decades.
Mr. Selbe has developed a similar open-source system to monitor illegal wildlife trafficking and threats to water and air quality in Botswana’s Okavango Delta. “We want it to be open-source and used by the most people who can,” he says. “There’s a lot we gain by sharing information.” Starting last year, with support from the National Geographic Society (whose magazine employed me until 2014), Mr. Selbe worked with colleagues to set up hubs in the region, outfitted with solar-powered sensor platforms to gather data and rush details to communities on the ground via cellular networks.
The system has pinpointed problems at the local level. In one area of the Okavango Delta, data earlier this year indicated sudden, conspicuous changes in the water’s pH. “I thought the sensor was off,” Mr. Selbe says. It wasn’t: Tour boats were idling in that part of the delta, with their engines spewing toxins, making pollution concentrate in the water. Mr. Selbe and his team worked with the boat drivers to find better places to park and discouraged them from letting engines idle, letting the water quality return to normal.
In separate projects, Mr. Selbe has also deployed drones to patrol coastal regions and used hydrophones—underwater microphone networks—to detect noise from fishing vessels illegally entering protected ocean waters. Too often, Mr. Selbe says, those who monitor illegal fishing have had to just “jump in a boat until they see something.”In the seven years since Mr. Selbe began his conservation-technology efforts, his expertise has been tapped by the State Department, the Pew Environment Group and the Pacific island nation of Palau, among others. He envisions an “Internet of environmental things” in which entire nature reserves can be connected via smart technology to spot and reduce threats. “None of this is hugely groundbreaking from a technological perspective alone,” he says. “But from a technological and conservation perspective, it is.”
,