How Africa’s Largest IoT Conservation Network Supports Wildlife Protection
June 28th, 2023
Via Fast Company, a look at how an IoT conservation network supports wildlife protection in Kenya by leveraging cloud-based sensors and networks to collect, monitor, and analyze environmental data in real time:
Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) and Connected Conservation Foundation are protecting the most vulnerable animals and natural resources in Kenya with Africa’s largest landscape-wide Internet of Things conservation network.
The project aims to enhance wildlife and natural resource conservation by leveraging cloud-based sensors and networks to collect, monitor, and analyze environmental data in real time.
This massive undertaking will contribute critical digital infrastructure to help Kenyan partners measure and achieve the global biodiversity targets set out at COP 15, the 2022 UN biodiversity conference, to conserve and manage at least 30% of the world’s natural habitats by 2030.
The data combined with analytics and conservation tools are geared toward effectively protecting and managing wildlife, ensuring peace, and improving the livelihood of the people of northern Kenya, says Samuel Lekimaroro, wildlife protection manager at Northern Rangelands Trust, a Kenyan conservation organization that works to protect and restore the Northern Rangelands of Kenya.
NRT’S IOT CONSERVATION NETWORK: THE FIRST IN KENYA
The NRT’s Internet of Things (IoT) conservation network, the first of its kind in Kenya, is made possible by the Connected Conservation Foundation, which has brought together a coalition of private- and public-sector partners including Cisco, Actility, 51 Degrees, and EarthRanger.The IoT network and high-bandwidth communication backbone currently covers about 7.4 million acres of wilderness in Kenya—a figure that includes 22 of NRT’s community-led conservancies and 4 private reserves with plans to bring more on board to include more of the region, says Sophie Maxwell, executive director of the Connected Conservation Foundation. More than 190 new sensors have been deployed to all parks, with more scheduled in the next few weeks, bringing the total to 250.
For this project, the LoRaWAN network management is done using Actility’s ThingPark platform. While Actility is on the network side, Cisco builds the LoRaWAN gateways or base stations and Actility manages the base stations and the end devices to collect the data and provide the data to application servers.
“What we provide is the core network that connects the base station and the end devices,” says Alper Yegin, chief technology officer at Actility, a provider of low-power networks that play a vital role in IoT infrastructure. “Then on the technical side, there are also sensors coming from various device makers as well as NRT and Connected Conservation.”
NRT and Connected Conservation manage the parks and identify what the use cases are and then they bring all the technologies together. As such, NRT and the Connected Conservation Foundation are the users of this deployment and Cisco is the technology provider, according to Yegin. “We’re providing an innovative solution to manage gateways, integrate sensors, and monitor network operations in real time,” he says.
REVOLUTIONIZING CONSERVATION PROGRAMS
The capabilities of this IoT technology are revolutionizing the way conservation programs operate, offering long-lasting, cost-effective, and secure sensors to combat poaching and protect endangered species, Yegin says.The LoRaWAN IoT sensors are perfect for deploying in the wildlife parks, tracking animals, tracking equipment and vehicles, tracking weather conditions as well as for monitoring the working conditions of machinery, Yegin says. And since the sensors have very low power consumption, once they’re placed on the animals, they can last for nearly 10 years, sometimes more, he says.
“The other special thing with this technology is that it uses unlicensed band, meaning one does not have to acquire a very expensive and limited license from the government,” Yegin says. “So it’s pretty much like Wi-Fi today—anyone can put up Wi-Fi and the same is true for LoRaWAN. As such, this also drives the cost down, which is essential in such wide-area deployments.”
Wildlife protection is a perfect use case for LPWAN IoT, given the vast territories to monitor, the necessity for long-lasting, low-cost sensors, and the requirement for secure technology to combat poaching, he says.
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The various sensors, which include rhino, lion, cheetah, and leopard trackers, livestock trackers, and ranger and vehicle trackers, provide critical data that is then visualized in EarthRanger for analysis and insights so that NRT can take any necessary conservation actions. EarthRanger is a tool that collects, integrates, and displays all historical and real-time data available from a protected area to enable organizations to make better decisions about how to manage those areas.For example, data from the ranger, vehicle, and wildlife sensors enable rangers to monitor and respond to rhino threats to prevent poaching, share information on sick or vulnerable animals, boost conservation management strategies, and redeploy security measures between conservancies.
INCREASE IN ENDANGERED BLACK RHINO POPULATION
Black rhinos are still critically endangered animals because of the demand for rhino horns on the international black market. Kenya, however, is one of the few places in the world where black rhino populations are increasing due to the success of these conservation efforts, Maxwell says.Consequently, it’s crucial to establish safe and connected rangelands for these endangered species to roam, according to Maxwell.
Having the tags on the rhinos enables the NRT to remove the fences and create larger connected habitats for the rhinos to roam, she says. And it has helped boost the black rhino numbers in Kenya by 10%.
“The technology is what we call a reserve-area network solution—and that is connectivity, communications, and sensors that bring real-time data back into an operations room,” she says. “That data is then visualized on the map through a range of software and that enables people to track the movement of people, the movement of wildlife, and the movement of the ranger teams. And that all happens in real time.”
The battery-powered LoRaWAN-enabled sensors communicate via a long-range, ultra-low data rate connection, resulting in longer battery life. Additionally, LoRa sensors are a fraction of the cost of satellite tracking tags—transforming how conservation programs operate because being able to deploy many sensors means capturing more data, enabling NRT to demonstrate the effectiveness of its conservation efforts, which is really valuable, according to Maxwell.
“Previously, NRT and our member conservancies used an analog system, and we were unable to observe what was happening in the landscape in terms of wildlife trends, asset monitoring, and security patrol coordination,” Lekimaroro says. “We were only communicating via radio between the conservancies and the Joint Operations and Communications Center (JOCC).”
Through Connected Conservation, NRT is now able to successfully protect and monitor wildlife, coordinate field patrols, and support the government and communities in peace efforts from an informed point of knowledge/data assessed by EarthRanger, according to Lekimaroro.
“All field patrol teams can be monitored and supported by the team in headquarters, which is the central location, from the JOCC,” he says. “Through technology, intra- and inter-conservancy communications have improved, allowing for more efficient surveillance, wildlife protection, and monitoring operations.”
The increased data transmission into the centralized JOCC system has helped the NRT assess patrol efforts, wildlife trends, patterns, and data generation for management decision making, Lekimaroro says.
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Read More »June 24th, 2023
In part due to illegal fishing, more than one third of the world’s fishery stocks have fallen below biologically sustainable levels, threatening the more than 3 billion people who depend on seafood for animal protein and further imperiling maritime ecosystems already stressed by elevated levels of carbon dioxide.
It’s rampant.
Seafood is one of the last animal proteins that people hunt in large quantities. Although farmed seafood has grown to more than half of global consumption, more than one hundred million tons are caught in the wild every year. By one estimate, illegal and unreported fishing accounts for one-fifth of that total.
It’s on your store shelves.
As much as 11 percent of U.S. seafood imports came from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
A stark reality confronts anyone who seeks to rein in bad behavior on the ocean: it is very, very big. To pinpoint where in the haystack to search for needles, a team of data scientists and machine learning engineers called Global Fishing Watch collects data from fishing boats’ Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders, whose signals are picked up by satellites and land-based receivers.
Recently, the team at Global Fishing Watch had a novel idea: instead of looking for where fishing boats broadcast their positions, what if they looked for where they hid them? “The AIS data tells us a lot, but the absence of it does as well,” Tyler Clavelle, a data scientist at Global Fishing Watch, told me.
Together with scientists from the University of California at Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries, Global Fishing Watch analyzed more than 28 billion AIS signals from 2017 to 2019. The researchers identified more than 55,000 gaps in the data and discovered that disabled transponders hide about 6 percent of the globe’s commercial fishing activity.
Gaps in transponder data, 2017-2019
Fewer
More
EUROPE
U.S vessels
go dark in the
Bering Sea
to hide from
competitors.
ASIA
NORTH AMERICA
Chinese-flagged
boats often don’t
report catch in the
Northwest Pacific.
Africa’s west
coast is a hotspot
for piracy and
illegal fishing.
AFRICA
SOUTH AMERICA
Illegal fishing has
been reported near
the Galapagos and
off Peru.
AUSTRALIA
The boundary along
Argentina’s Exclusive
Economic Zone showed
the highest volume of
data gaps.
Fishing boats often hide their signals on the edge of Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) boundaries, where countries have the right to exploit the resources within 200 nautical miles off their shoreline. That’s just what the Oyang 77 did in early 2019 when it vanished and reappeared near the boundary of Argentina’s EEZ.
The South Korean-flagged trawler belonged to the fleet operated by the Sajo Oyang corporation, notorious for its record of high seas transgressions, as documented by The Guardian. In recent years, the Oyang 77 had gotten in trouble in New Zealand for illegally dumping dead fish overboard, underreporting catch and failing to pay workers, according to a report from Oceana, a nonprofit focused on ocean conservancy.
In February 2019, the Argentine Coast Guard discovered the trawler with its nets extended inside the EEZ. They found more than 310,000 pounds of seafood on board. Leaving nothing to chance, they deployed a helicopter and an airplane to assist the Coast Guard in escorting the Oyang 77 to shore, releasing it after confiscating its fishing equipment and extracting a fine of 25 million Argentine pesos, or about $550,000.
Sajo Oyang did not respond to multiple requests to comment.
Global Fishing Watch’s data did not help catch the Oyang 77, but patrol boats from the U.S. Coast Guard and Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans already make use of it to decide which boats to pursue. Countries inspecting fishing boats in port can use Global Fishing Watch’s analytical tools to narrow their search.
“You can look up a vessel and see a history of its activity and quickly filter out vessels that appear to be operating above board, or identify vessels that have big gaps in their data or are operating in ways that are suspicious,” Clavelle said.
Using ships’ AIS data to enforce illegal fishing laws is not as easy as it sounds. AIS is not universally mandated aboard commercial fishing boats. Many fleets, including U.S. fishing boats, are tracked with a separate technology called the Vessel Monitoring System, which is visible to authorities but hidden from other vessels.
AIS was created in the 1990s as a way to keep oil tankers from crashing. In the 2000s, private companies began launching satellites that could capture AIS signals from space, and a new industry emerged to supply government agencies with ships’ location data. Yet even law-abiding fisherman sometimes wish to hide their location, either to conceal good fishing spots from competitors or to avoid capture in waters where pirates lurk.
“We thought we might have a pure illegal fishing story,” said Heather Welch, a NOAA affiliate and marine biologist at UC Santa Cruz, who led the research with Global Fishing Watch. “And it became very clear that that’s not fair to the fishermen, that that’s not the story we’re seeing here.”
The researchers used a method of machine learning to separate the innocent AIS disabling from the nefarious. For instance, behavior that could have looked like statistical noise appeared to the researchers’ computer program as “loitering,” when boats with disabled transponders were motionless long enough to offload their catch to giant floating refrigerators called reefers.
This is not always illegal, but it can be a way for boats with illegal catch to get rid of the evidence. “It’s a way to launder illegally caught seafood into the supply chain,” Welch told me. That makes it harder to know whether the fish at the grocery store was caught legally or not. The analysis could help coast guards pinpoint where and when illegal transshipment is likely to take place.
Some in the fishing industry say that the rise of farmed seafood will reduce the opportunities for illegal fishing. The share of seafood from aquaculture grew from 6 percent in 1960 to 58 percent today, according to figures from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
That share is likely to keep rising, said Gavin Gibbons, vice president of communications at the National Fisheries Institute, an industry lobby. “There’s only going to be more farmed going forward. Period. End of story,” Gibbons told me. “Farming will have to increase in order to feed a growing planet.”
Yet aquaculture has only kept pace with the growth in seafood consumption and has not replaced wild caught seafood. Since the 1990s, wild seafood catch has stayed steady at about 100 million tons per year.
In short, fish farming has not lowered the pressure on wild marine life. Even if aquaculture continues to grow, there will always be demand for wild caught fish, which many people prefer to the farmed variety.
If aquaculture is not the solution to overfishing on the high seas, perhaps technology is. Global Fishing Watch and allies like Oceana, which co-founded the project in 2015, have pushed to require AIS on more commercial fishing boats. Global Fishing Watch’s next goal is to learn to detect fishing boats directly from satellite imagery, which would reveal far more activity than AIS signals alone.
“What gets monitored gets managed,” Clavelle told me. “So if you can’t see what’s happening on the ocean, how do you expect to manage it properly?” ,
Read More »Oceans To Get Better Protection With Connected Underwater Technology
June 15th, 2023
Via the EU’s Horizon Innovation Magazine, a look at how – amid rising sea levels, plastics pollution and overfishing – the emerging Internet of Underwater Things will vastly expand knowledge about the world’s seas.
Imagine seals swimming in the sea with electronic tags that send real-time water data to scientists back in their laboratories. Or archaeologists near a coast being automatically alerted when a diver trespasses on a precious shipwreck.
Such scenarios are becoming possible as a result of underwater connected technologies, which can help monitor and protect the world’s oceans. They can also shed light on the many remaining mysteries of the sea.
New frontier
‘A lot of funding has been provided to companies and institutions exploring space, but we have oceans around us that we have not explored,’ said Vladimir Djapic, innovation associate at the EU-funded TEUTA project.
Around 70% of the Earth is covered by oceans and more than four-fifths of them have never been mapped, explored or even seen by humans.
The Internet of Underwater Things, or IoUT, is a network of smart, interconnected sensors and devices to make communicating in the sea easier. It contrasts with the Internet of Things, or IoT, covering everything from smart phones to devices that allow people to switch on home heating remotely,
TEUTA ran from October 2020 through March 2022. It helped a Croatian company, H20 Robotics, develop and sell lightweight low-cost acoustic devices and robotic platforms for underwater wireless networks.
‘With a limited number of underwater network installations before, we could only explore limited coastal areas,’ said Djapic, who is chief executive officer of Zagreb-based H20 Robotics.
Advances in underwater technologies are expected to transform many sectors including marine biology, environmental monitoring, construction and geology.
Whale-like ways
TEUTA developed acoustic technology, which mimics the way whales and dolphins communicate.
Acoustic waves, unlike radio or optical communication ones, travel long distances underwater regardless of whether it is murky or clear.
Remote sensors, measuring tools, detection systems or cameras set up at an underwater site gather data then sent to a buoy on the surface. The buoy in turn sends the information wirelessly back to base, via the cloud, without the need for communication cables.
One focus area is improving communications between divers and land-based colleagues, according to Djapic.
‘For example, a diver working in underwater construction can send a message to a supervisor and request additional help or tools or similar,’ said Djapic.
Improved underwater communications will help connect land and sea, © H2O ROBOTICS, 2023Improved underwater communications will help connect land and sea, © H2O ROBOTICS, 2023
Scientists also stand to benefit by, for example, being able to remotely turn on a water-quality measuring device installed on the seabed from their labs.
For their part, archaeologists could use the technology to help protect vulnerable underwater sites with intruder-detection technology installed in remote locations.
Indeed, TEUTA technology will support another EU-backed project, TECTONIC, seeking to improve the documentation and protection of underwater cultural heritage at three pilot sites.
The sites are the Capo Rizzuto Marine Protected Area in southern Italy, the submerged ancient harbour of Aegina in Greece’s Saronic Gulf and a shipwreck site in the Deseado estuary in Argentina.
Other possibilities such as underwater agriculture or mining could also open up, according to Djapic.
For public agencies or non-governmental organisations that monitor water quality, the technology could replace the need for researchers to go and collect samples physically and deliver them to the lab.
While TEUTA gave a boost to fledgling underwater communication technologies, more work needs to be done in marketing them and ensuring they are used more widely, according to Djapic.
‘It all needs to be analysed,’ he said. ‘Our technology enables the measuring of environmental parameters.’
Sensors and samplers
Meanwhile, in Italy, a team of researchers is pursuing a new approach to ocean-data collection by using sensors and samplers that could be integrated into existing observatories and platforms.
This would enable the gathering of vast amounts of information useful for, as an example, the proposed European Digital Twin of the Ocean announced in February 2022. The twin will be a real-time digital replica of the ocean integrating both historical and live data.
By developing a new generation of marine technologies, the EU-funded NAUTILOS project will gather previously inaccessible information and improve understanding of physical, chemical and biological changes in oceans.
Running for four years through September 2024, the project is coordinated by Gabriele Pieri of the Rome-based National Research Council.
‘Our proposal set out to fill a gap in the observation of oceans,’ said Pieri. ‘They are the largest habitats on Earth, but the least observed ones because of the difficulties in on-site observation and the costs of monitoring.’
NAUTILOS technology is already being tested in the Baltic and the Mediterranean seas, including the Aegean and Adriatic.
Sensors can, for example, measure levels of chlorophyll-A and dissolved oxygen in the water. These are important indicators of water quality and, by extension, of the presence of fish, helping protect their stocks.
Sensors and samplers collecting information about the concentration of microplastics in the water also expand understanding of the impact of human-generated pollution on the oceans.
Helping flippers and hands
One of the NAUTILOS partners, France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), has even recruited some unlikely teammates: seals.
Swimming off the Valdes Peninsula in Argentina, these sea creatures have been tagged with sensors that record valuable data about the animals themselves and their habitats.
The NAUTILOS team, made up of research institutions and companies, is developing more than a dozen types of sensors and samplers. These include remote sensing technologies and microplastics detectors.
The project is keen to demonstrate that the new tools can work with existing and future platforms and easily switch between them.
The tools are relatively cheap, can be deployed quickly and work in conjunction with other equipment, offering many advantages. For example, a sensor can be mounted on an autonomous underwater vehicle and then moved to a fixed buoy.
Citizen science is an important part of NAUTILOS, which works with volunteers organising campaigns around ocean plastics, for example, as well as with scuba-diving associations whose members can test new technologies and offer feedback.
The team has also developed a smartphone app for divers to upload photos of underwater flora or fauna that can be assessed by researchers.
‘The interest in citizen science has really surprised me,’ said Pieri. ‘A lot of people are willing to help improve the life of the sea.’
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Read More »Tracking Whales As They Cruise The Arctic
May 11th, 2023
Via Terra Daily, an article on how researchers were able to simultaneously tracking multiple whales using fiber-optic cables in the Arctic, off the coast of Svalbard:
Fibre-optic cables line the coasts of the continents and criss-cross the oceans, carrying signals that are the backbone of communication in the modern world. While their main job is telecommunications, researchers have been exploring ways to use this giant network to eavesdrop on everything from storms to earthquakes to whales.
Now, working with two nearly parallel fibre-optic telecommunications cables off the Norwegian arctic archipelago of Svalbard, researchers have been able to estimate the positions and tracks of eight fin whales along a section of the cable – for five hours.“This work demonstrates how we were able to simultaneously locate and follow these whales over an 1800 km2 area – with relatively low infrastructure investment,” said Martin Landro, head of the Centre for Geophysical Forecasting at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and one of the members of the team that did the work.
Transforming fibre cables into hydrophones
The system the researchers used for this work is called Distributed Acoustic Sensing, or DAS. DAS uses an instrument called an interrogator to send laser pulses into a fibre-optic system and records the returning light pulses, essentially turning the cables into a series of hydrophones.
Landro and his colleagues first began to explore the ability of DAS to record underwater vibrations and sounds in the waters off Svalbard in June 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, they collected 40 days of recordings and roughly 250 terabytes of data. From these data, researchers were able to identify more than 800 whale songs and calls.
The researchers have built on this early work to expand their ability to identify different whale species and to conduct real time recording from the fibre optic cables in Svalbard.
For this latest effort, published in Frontiers of Marine Science, the researchers had access to two, nearly parallel 250 km long fibre-optic cables that extend from Longyearbyen, the main settlement in Svalbard, to Ny-Alesund, a research outpost to the northwest. The paired cables allowed the researchers to localize the whales with an accuracy of roughly 100 metres, within an area of roughly 1800 km2.
“This shows that the two fibre cables are a very effective means of monitoring whales in the Arctic,” Landro said.
A melting Arctic
As a Norwegian territory in the high arctic, Svalbard offers Landro and other researchers an important base from which to study this changing ecosystem.
Recent research predicts that the Arctic could be ice free in the summer as early as 2035, which could increase shipping and cruise ship traffic across the top of the globe.
As one small example, as many as 35 cruise ships and additional smaller expedition ships are expected to transport up to 75,000 people to Longyearbyen and surroundings in 2023, according to Visit Svalbard.
Could reduce ship strike risk
Whales are already changing the way they use the Arctic and Antarctic as feeding grounds, with some research showing that fin whales have begun spending time year-round in Arctic regions. That means increased ship traffic in these areas can also increase the likelihood of ship strikes. The use of the existing fibre-optic cable network and DAS could help reduce this possibility, the researchers said.
“The capabilities demonstrated here establish the potential for a near-real-time whale tracking capability that could be applied anywhere in the world where there are whales and fiber-optic cables,” the researchers wrote. “Coupled with ship detection, using a similar approach ….a real-time collision avoidance system could be developed to reduce ship strikes.”
This development comes at a time when NORDUnet, the Nordic Gateway for Research and Innovation and the Nordic NRENs have begun a number of initiatives to investigate and plan the first submarine fibre-optic cable system between Europe, Asia, and North America to secure a shorter route through the Arctic Ocean. The effort is called Polar Connect.
If such an initiative is realized, “it would open far greater areas for us to follow whale movements in the Arctic,” Landro said.
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Read More »Reconnecting To Nature Via Apps
May 9th, 2023
Courtesy of The Washington Post, a look at how naturalist apps, designed and managed by scientists with world-class data, help us reconnect with the world around us:
First I see the wall barley, like tiny fields of wheat on the side of the road. Then a profusion of musk stork’s-bill overflowing with purple flowers. That’s just the crack in the sidewalk.
By the time I reach my office, I’ve identified dozens of species, most unknown to me a few hours earlier.
I’m not a master naturalist, but I have one in my pocket. Thanks to artificial intelligence trained on millions of observations, anyone with a smartphone can snap a picture or record a sound to identify tens of thousands of species, from field bluebells to native bumblebees.
If I’m honest, it’s the kind of thing I would normally miss while walking or pedaling to work. Birdsong might be gorgeous but I’d barely hear it. I’d note “pine tree” as a catchall for conifers.
That has changed. I’m now on a first-name basis with most of my wild neighbors. It has reconnected me to a natural world I love, yet never studied deeply enough to know all its characters and settings. I’m hardly an exception.
Homo sapiens sapiens may have never been this divorced from nature. Humans across much of the industrialized world have become an indoor species: About 90 percent of our time is spent inside.
It’s hard to fathom. For 2.5 million years, humans spent a huge share, if not virtually all, of their time outdoors. Today, many adults are spending more hours on screens than outside.
Nature is even disappearing from our books, songs and culture, say researchers who looked at nature-related words in popular works during the mid-20th century. Our mental and physical health has declined alongside our estrangement from the outdoors.
But what technology has torn asunder, perhaps it can begin to mend. For people who don’t know the difference between a robin and a magpie, this new generation of naturalist apps is the Rosetta Stone to the natural world. Reestablishing relationships with your outdoor neighbors might not only transform your commute, it might change your life.
Four apps to rule them all
There are more than a dozen apps promising to help you identify the natural world, many of them paid. Don’t bother. Four apps, designed and managed by scientists with world-class data, meet all your ID needs free of charge. And every observation will advance our scientific understanding of the natural world.
The easiest to use is Seek. The app, an offshoot of iNaturalist, a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, lets you shoot live video. It automatically grabs frames and analyzes them. The augmented reality experience is like downloading a foreign language into your brain. The app identifies the taxonomy of plants and animals instantly as you shoot. If it can’t figure out the species, it will give you its best guess.
In less than an hour, I had racked up dozens of plants and insects near my house from Bombus vosnesenskii, a native yellow-faced bumblebee, to the purple-flowered bush lupine it was buzzing around. The only drawback? The app doesn’t include deeper context about the species it identifies.
For that, there’s iNaturalist and Pl@ntNet. Both offer sophisticated, if slightly less user-friendly, apps that upload and analyze photographs of flora. In seconds, they typically return a ranked list of potential candidates with rich descriptions of each. The identification of the most common species is a slam dunk. For rarer ones, it’s easy to compare your observation against those of others in the database.
The apps’ real superpower is the community around them: Millions of citizen scientists who can vet and confirm your observations. It’s particularly satisfying to watch your skills — and ranking — rise in the apps as you get to know your neighborhood. When you’re ready to up your game, download these apps.
Finally, there’s Merlin Bird ID, a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Merlin feels like magic. The app uses a phone’s sensitive microphone to identify bird vocalizations in the sonic landscape around you, painting a visual representation or sonogram analogous to a musical score.
Within seconds as I’m walking through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the app recognizes the high-pitched staccato of a dark-eyed junco, as well as the falsetto of the Pacific wren.
Merlin has permanently changed how I hear the world. I can now tune in to birdsong operas that had never entered my consciousness. Within a day, I was able to recognize distinct calls without consulting the app.
That, of course, was the point, says Grant Van Horn, a machine learning researcher at the Cornell Lab, who helped build Merlin’s sound ID feature. “If you ever go on a bird walk with someone who knows their birds, it is crazy cool,” he says. “Our inspiration is getting that expertise and sharing it with anyone who has a phone in their pocket.” They succeeded.
Advancing science
But the apps are more than tools to get acquainted with nature. They’re pushing AI identification — and conservation — forward. Recognizing natural inhabitants, and our relationship to them, helps us rediscover what remains and protect it.“We’re just at the beginning of actual real scientific progress,” says Van Horn. “And none of this stuff happens without a passionate group of people that helps you curate, train and evaluate the data. There’s still a ton of opportunity for these passionate communities to contribute their expertise.”
The first big breakthrough came around 2018 from Snapshot Serengeti, a research project using digital camera traps to photograph thousands of migrating African animals. Organizing this enormous collection featuring a variety of animals, from wildebeests to giraffes, proved overwhelming for the small team of scientists.
So researchers enlisted thousands of online volunteers to sort and label more than 3 million images. That allowed Jeff Clune, then a computer scientist at the University of Wyoming, and his collaborators to unleash algorithms on what was at the time the world’s largest collection of labeled wildlife images. The new algorithms could identify animals in 99 percent of images with the same accuracy as human volunteers, around 97 percent, according to a seminal paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When applied to all data, it could save an estimated 8.4 years of human labor.
Breakthroughs like this are why the apps in your hand can now identify daisies, dandelions and, if you are on the African plains, a lion, Panthera leo. And every observation you contribute makes these a little bit better.
Citizen science-powered algorithms are now going beyond individual organisms. They’re mapping their relationships to an entire ecosystem, from the flower a butterfly pollinates to the leaf where the insect lays its eggs.
“My goal is to turn ecosystems into fire hoses of data,” says Clune. “In the same way a video game company knows everything that happens inside their system, we should know that for the Amazon rainforest. Imagine what that would mean for science. We could answer questions we would never have been able to do.”
Naming nature
Ultimately, the apps’ greatest breakthrough may not be technological at all. It may be raising our awareness. We are nearly blind to entire categories of living creatures. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer described it as “being lost in a foreign city where you can’t read the street signs,” a form of species loneliness. While these plants and animals are our neighbors, we scarcely acknowledge their existence, let alone their right to exist.
By naming my wild neighbors, I’ve found my perception of them transformed from grainy and distant to powerful and familiar.
Author Jenny Odell writes about a similar experience in the book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. The simple act of paying attention to the birds around her home in Oakland, Calif., led her down a path of reclaiming her attention from the frenetic, exploitative digital cacophony.
Now, instead of asking what’s there, she asks who: a raven, robin, song sparrow or nuthatch. Instead of a blur of green, she sees redwoods, oaks and blackberries.
This could reverse one of the great losses of the past century: our severed connection to the unique, wild character of where we live.
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Read More »Transforming Nature Conservation With The Power of Satellite Imagery
April 25th, 2023
Via Terra Daily, a look at how satellite imagery is transforming conservation:
Satellite imagery is changing conservation as we know it. By being able to take an inventory of the Earth’s surface and observe changes, we can begin to understand ecosystem dynamics in an unprecedented level of detail. Satellite imagery is already supplementing traditional conservation research methods, and in some cases is even replacing them. High-quality satellite images can be used to rapidly detect deforestation, observe mining operations, locate wildlife colonies, and even track illegal activities that are harming our planet.
Monitoring ecosystems from space using the latest Earth observation satellites allows scientists and conservationists to vastly improve the information they collect: leading to higher-quality insights, or information about areas which would otherwise be impossible to survey.For example, satellites can observe cross-border areas easily, without requiring permission from multiple civil aviation jurisdictions. They can capture large areas of the planet in one go, which can help to avoid miscounts and human errors, where the same area might accidentally be covered on multiple passes. They are of course also completely unobtrusive, meaning that there is no risk of disturbing or damaging species or habitats during the course of the surveying activities. And they can reach parts of our planet that would otherwise be inaccessible. For example, a new colony of 1.5 million Adelie penguins that had remained hidden for nearly 3,000 years was finally detected thanks to satellite imagery in 2018.
Using satellites therefore seems like a no-brainer: why wouldn’t scientists automatically choose to use them compared to other methods?
Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that simple. A laptop in the field would likely struggle to process satellite imagery due to the enormous size of the images, or would at the very least require specialist software. There are also external factors that can create a large variability in the quality of satellite imagery. Having passed the technological and financial hurdle to acquire the satellite imagery in the first place, failing to gather valuable data due to an inconveniently-placed cloud or poor lighting is extremely frustrating for the researchers.
Partnerships are key to overcoming these hurdles
Connected Conservation Foundation (CCF) brings together local people, partners and technology companies to protect wildlife and ecosystems using technology. CCF and their conservation field partners are able to use satellite imagery donated by the Airbus Foundation to explore the value of satellite imagery for a number of nature conservation projects.+ Detecting poaching incidents from space: Using Airbus’s pioneering 30cm high-resolution satellite imagery, CCF helped the team at the Madikwe Game Reserve in South Africa identify a tragic poaching incident. Two rhino carcasses were detected in satellite imagery, which allowed the park rangers to ascertain the time of death and assisted them with the subsequent investigation.
+ Locating endangered species in hard-to-reach areas: CCF brought together imagery from Airbuss Pleiades Neo satellites with an AI-powered solution by technology services company NTT Ltd. to locate endangered species in hard-to-reach areas. By using satellite imagery to guide conservationists, teams can identify wildlife hotspots and map the movements of different species, even across borders. This helps to create ‘heat maps’ of species’ territories and migration which in turn enables conservationists to be able to better protect them.
+ Capturing vital ecosystem information: By mapping water resources, human settlements, grasslands and invasive plant species from Space, more informed sustainable management plans can be developed to respond to climate change and fluctuating levels of natural resources. This will better support local communities and conservation activities.
The Airbus Foundation’s next project with CCF will be taking satellite images of the extensive Lorian ecosystem for the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) in Kenya.
Together, CCF and the Airbus Foundation have secured 1,900 km2 of high-resolution satellite imagery for NRT researchers to use as they plan conservation activities. It will provide a baseline to measure ecosystem recovery over the next ten years as well as help define new protected areas, where researchers will survey and map water distribution, human settlements and flora and fauna, including invasive species.
Additionally, government agencies including Museum Kenya, Kenya University and the Kenya Wildlife Service will also work with NRT to use this imagery to plan ways to mitigate human-wildlife incidents between elephants, lions and local people. This will help establish wildlife corridors and allow communities to better coexist and thrive together.
In the face of global threats such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, wildfires, and other challenges, organisations like CCF need access to timely, accurate data. The Airbus Foundation is pleased to share satellite imagery that organisations can use to protect wildlife and their habitats, supporting their efforts to protect ecosystems, combat wildlife poaching, and reduce human-wildlife conflict.
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