Scientist Uses Drones and Algorithms To Save Whales — And The Rest Of The Ocean
October 28th, 2022
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.”
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Read More »Saving Whales From Ship Collisions With Technology
September 24th, 2022
Via New York Times, a look at how scientists hope to use technology to help save whales from ship collisions:
Fran washed ashore in August, some 25 miles south of the Golden Gate Bridge. The beloved and much-photographed female humpback whale had a broken neck, most likely the result of being hit by a ship.
This latest instance of oceanic roadkill increased the tally of whales killed by ships near San Francisco this year to four. The true death toll is likely to be much higher as whale carcasses often sink to the sea floor.
Scientists and conservationists are trying to drive that number to zero. On Wednesday, Whale Safe, an A.I.-powered detection system, began operating around San Francisco Bay. Its goal is to warn large ships in the area’s waters when whales are nearby.
About 25 miles out to sea from the Golden Gate on Monday afternoon, a yellow buoy bobbed not far from the great white shark hunting grounds of the Farallon Islands. On a boat close by called the Nova, Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara, donned a wet suit and snorkel and jumped into the brine to give the buoy some T.L.C. before its big day. The buoy, tethered to an underwater microphone, is an integral part of Whale Safe.
Researchers estimate more than 80 endangered blue, humpback and fin whales are killed by ships each year along the West Coast. With increasing global marine traffic, the problems created by thousands of massive ships crisscrossing waters that teem with ocean giants are expected to only worsen. Near San Francisco in particular, climate change has been shifting the whales’ food closer to shore, placing the whales in harm’s way more often, according to Kathi George, field operations manager for the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif.
That’s why Dr. McCauley and a network of collaborators developed Whale Safe with funding from Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce, and his wife, Lynne. Whale Safe, which has been operating in the Santa Barbara Channel since 2020, provides near-real-time data on the presence of whales and sends out alerts to mariners, shipping companies and anyone else who signs up. The hope is that if ship captains get an alert saying there are lots of whales in the area, they might be more likely to shift course or slow their approach to port — a tactic that research suggests makes deadly collisions less likely.
“The near-real-time aspect of Whale Safe’s alerts and being able to have an idea of where whales are 24 hours a day is really unique and gives us a lot more information to share with ships coming in and out of the Bay,” said Maria Brown, superintendent of the Cordell Bank and Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuaries for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Expanding Whale Safe from the Southern California shipping lanes to San Francisco will cover the two busiest hubs in California and two epicenters of whale mortality from ship strikes.
In 2021, the first full year of Whale Safe’s operation in the Santa Barbara Channel, there were no recorded whale-ship interactions in the area, which Dr. McCauley called an encouraging sign.
Whale Safe also uses publicly available location data transmitted by ships to determine whether they slow down to 10 knots during trips through the whales’ feeding grounds, something NOAA has been asking large ships to do during whale season (usually May to November off California) since 2014. Whale Safe processes the information on vessel speed and assigns shipping companies a letter grade.
Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, earned a “B” for slowing down 79 percent of the time in the Santa Barbara Channel. But ships operated by Matson, a major player in Pacific shipping, slowed only 16 percent of the time and received an “F.”
A spokesperson for Matson said the company had long instructed its ships to participate in NOAA’s voluntary speed reduction programs “to the greatest extent possible, given our operational requirements. A large percentage of our vessels have been averaging less than 12 knots.”
On Monday afternoon at the buoy, Dr. McCauley used a kitchen scrubber and a plastic putty knife to scrape away algae and checked that various instruments were intact. The device’s underwater microphone was positioned some 280 feet beneath his flippers, listening for whales from the sea bottom and attached to its floating counterpart’s communications array with a beefy rubber-clad cable. This high-tech buoy was developed by Mark Baumgartner of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and his team is using the same technology to listen for critically endangered North Atlantic Right whales along the East Coast.
Whale Safe uses three data streams: the buoy listens for and identifies the songs of blue, fin and humpback whales with an algorithm and beams its findings to a satellite; a mathematical model informed by present and past oceanographic and biological data predicts where blue whales are most likely to be; and citizen scientists and trained observers report whale sightings via an app called Whale Alert.
Whale Safe’s platform integrates these data sources and alerts ships to their likelihood of encountering whales that day.
In 2019, before the system’s Santa Barbara launch, 46 percent of vessels slowed down in the Southern California voluntary speed reduction zones, and now the percentage has risen to 60 percent in 2022. But those increases can also be credited to a financial incentive program called Protecting Blue Whales and Blue Skies that pays shipping companies that slow down for whales, as well as more than a decade of outreach from NOAA officials like Ms. Brown to shipping companies.
In the San Francisco area, cooperation rates with NOAA’s speed limits have been hovering around 62 percent for the last three years, and the hope is that Whale Safe can help get them higher.
“We are looking to industry to rise to the occasion voluntarily,” Ms. Brown said. “If they can’t do that, our council has asked us to consider making these speed limits mandatory like they are on the East Coast where they have 80 percent compliance.”
The response from shipping companies has been encouraging, Dr. McCauley said, with some of the world’s largest outfits asking for more information about the good or bad grade they received and on how to get Whale Safe’s alerts to their fleets most efficiently.
CMA CGM, the world’s third largest container shipping company, has created an automated pipeline to disseminate Whale Safe’s alerts straight to ship captains near the Santa Barbara Channel.
Whale Safe’s team is also working with Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world’s largest shipbuilder, to bring the system’s data directly into the navigation systems of newly built ships, said Callie Steffen, a scientist at the Benioff Ocean Initiative and Whale Safe’s project leader.
Now that the system is switched on in two locations, Dr. McCauley said the immediate goal was to continue outreach with companies and try to reduce whale fatalities from ship strikes to zero in the places where Whale Safe is operating. Ms. Steffen and others aim to expand Whale Safe’s ship-speed monitoring to all areas of designated whale concern in the United States and Canada on both coasts.
On Monday, fog erased the horizon as the Nova motored away from the buoy. When the fog broke, the sea ahead of the boat erupted with whale spouts and leaping sea lions. The boat cut its engines, and Dr. McCauley whipped out a camera with a long lens to try to identify some of the nine humpbacks researchers spotted.
The air took on the fishy, primordial odor of whale breath as everyone on board marveled at the wildness on display. Then the radio crackled: Vessel Traffic Services, which manages ship movement in and out of the Bay, said the Nova needed to exit the shipping lane because a large vessel was coming through. The scientists radioed back that the big ship needed to be warned it was headed into an area where whales had been sighted.
While the Nova headed back to San Francisco, Dr. McCauley said that as he was framing up the feeding humpback whales for his photographs, he couldn’t help but think of the recently deceased Fran.
“That should have been her,” he said, with a slight catch in his voice.
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Read More »Tiny Solar Backpacks Could Help Save One of Australia’s Most Endangered Birds
September 20th, 2022
Via EcoWatch, an article on how tiny solar backpacks could help save Australia’s endangered plains-wanderer:
The plains-wanderer is a small, critically-endangered bird with a tawny marking on its chest that can only be found in south-eastern Australia’s arid grasslands. It is estimated that only 250 to 1,000 of these speckled birds are left in the wild, according to Bush Heritage Australia. The plains-wanderer is at risk of impending extinction and is the lone surviving species on its branch of the evolutionary tree.
In order to track this rare bird species, fifteen plains-wanderers have been released into their native habitat in New South Wales (NSW) wearing tiny solar-powered backpacks equipped with satellite tracking technology, a press release from the NSW Government’s Minister for Environment and Heritage said.
It is only the second time the birds have been released in NSW and is part of a joint government conservation effort between Southern Australia (SA), Victoria and NSW.
“This second-ever release of Plains-wanderers back into their native habitat in NSW is the culmination of years of conservation work aimed at bringing the species back from the brink,” said NSW Environment Minister James Griffin in the press release. “Plains-wanderers are a small, ground-dwelling bird that is particularly vulnerable to threats such as foxes and feral cats, and native grassland habitat loss. They’re a critical part of the ecosystem because their presence or absence is an indicator of the health of their native habitat.”
As part of the Saving our Species program sponsored by the NSW Government — which has $175 in funding over a ten-year period — the plains-wanderers were released into Oolambeyan National Park, a critical habitat for the rare bird species.
The solar-powered backpacks can provide as much as two years of satellite data. Earlier backpack tracking devices only had a battery life of 12 weeks and were only able to be tracked with field transmitters.
“These solar-backpack wearing Plains-wanderers are paving the way for us to gather important data, which will ultimately help us improve our conservation efforts for wild populations into the future,” Griffin said.
Before a drastic decline in numbers in the past decade, the plains-wanderer was apparent throughout eastern Australia, reported The Guardian. Much of their known remaining habitat is on privately-owned land.
The quail-like birds have very specific habitat requirements. The population isn’t able to sustain itself during droughts, when there are fewer insects and materials to make nests. But during periods of extreme rain, an excess of weeds can cause the birds to relocate, but researchers aren’t sure where the endangered birds go.
All of the fifteen plains-wanderers released into the wild were from conservation breeding programs — eleven from NSW’s Taronga Western Plains Zoo, three from SA’s Monarto Safari Park and one from Victoria’s Werribee Open Range Zoo, the press release said.
“Three of the recently released birds have come from Monarto Safari Park, and this project is a great example of our zoos working together across a number of jurisdictions with the help of private landholders to help save a native species,” said South Australia Minister for Climate, Environment and Water Susan Close in the press release.
The second NSW release follows a release of ten birds in March near Hay in NSW and 16 last year in Victoria in conjunction with a national recovery initiative to bring the species back from the brink of extinction.
“This is the first ever plains-wanderer release to use satellite technology to track the endangered species and the more we know about this elusive bird, the better chance we have at conservation success. This joint initiative is part of our record investment into protecting our precious biodiversity,” said Victorian Minister for Environment and Climate Action Lily D’Ambrosio in the press release.
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Read More »The World’s Fishermen as a Maritime Sensor Network
September 2nd, 2022
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.
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Read More »Swarms of Satellites Are Tracking Illegal Fishing and Logging
September 2nd, 2022
Via Wired, an article on how – in some of the world’s most inaccessible places – tiny satellites are watching—and listening—for signs of destruction:
Fishing boats kept washing up in Japan with dead North Koreans on board. Dozens were documented every year, but they spiked in 2017, with more than 100 boats found on the northern coasts of Japan. No one could explain the appearance of these ghost ships. Why were there so many?
An answer arrived in 2020. Using a swarm of satellites orbiting Earth, a nonprofit organization called Global Fishing Watch in Washington, DC, found that China was fishing illegally in North Korean waters, “in contravention of Chinese and North Korean laws, as well as UN sanctions on North Korea,” says Paul Woods, the organization’s cofounder and chief innovation officer. As a result, North Korean fishermen were having to travel further afield, as far as Russia, something their small ships weren’t suited for. “They couldn’t get back,” says Woods. China, caught out, promptly halted its activities.
The alarming discovery was made possible by the DC-based firm Spire Global, which operates more than 100 small satellites in Earth orbit. These are designed to pick up the radio pings sent out by boats across the globe, which are primarily used by vessels to avoid each other on the seas. Listening out for them is also a useful way to track illegal maritime activity.
“The way they move when they’re fishing is distinct,” says Woods of the boats. “We can predict what kind of fishing gear they’re using by their speed, direction, and the way they turn.” Of the 60,000 vessels that emit such pings, Woods says 5,000 have been found conducting illegal activities thanks to Spire, including fishing at restricted times or offloading hauls of protected fish to other vessels to avoid checks at ports.
Satellite constellations like Spire’s have seen huge growth in recent years, and novel uses like this are becoming more common. Where once satellites would be large, bulky machines costing tens of millions of dollars, technological advances mean smaller, toaster-sized ones can now be launched at a fraction of the cost. Flying these together in groups, or constellations, to conduct unique assignments has become an affordable prospect. “It’s now economically viable to deploy many, many more satellites,” says Joel Spark, cofounder and a general manager at Spire.
Before 2018, no constellations of more than 100 active satellites had ever been launched into Earth orbit, says Jonathan McDowell, a satellite expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the US. Now there are three, with nearly 20 more constellations in the process of being launched and some 200 more in development. It is a “boom in constellations,” says McDowell.
The reasons for flying constellations are numerous. The most notorious is to beam the internet to remote locations, made famous by SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation. This vast swarm of 3,000 satellites accounts for nearly half of all those in orbit, and it will swell further to 12,000 or more. Others, like Amazon, have plans for vast space internet constellations of their own. Many are worried about launching so many satellites into orbit, significantly raising the risk of collisions and producing dangerous space junk.
Smaller satellite constellations have their problems too. Many of their satellites lack the ability to maneuver, for example, to avoid a collision. “I’m a little uncomfortable with it,” says McDowell, although their small size means most fall back into our atmosphere within a few years, naturally clearing the skies. For now we can cope, but stricter regulation will be needed in the future as more are launched.
Satellite constellations can encompass the globe, providing valuable data that single satellites cannot. Some can track illegal methane emissions, others can provide useful communications networks, and others still can provide constant imagery of our planet’s surface. “I definitely did not expect the diversity of use cases,” says Sara Spangelo, cofounder and CEO of Swarm Technologies in California, whose own constellation of 160 satellites allows small packets of data to be sent between devices around the globe, even from remote locations, creating a worldwide internet of things.
One organization—Rainforest Connection, based in Texas—has found a particularly novel way of using Swarm’s satellites: tracking illegal logging and poaching in more than 32 countries. In areas where loggers or poachers might operate, Rainforest places solar-powered acoustic sensors called Guardians high in treetops, designed to blend in with the tree from the ground. If the sensors pick up the sound of illegal activity up to 1.5 kilometers away (assessed by software on board the Guardians), such as chain saws or gunshots, they send a signal to one of Swarm’s satellites overhead, which relays the information back to a ground station.
This allows Rainforest Connection to alert law enforcement or locals to illegal activity, from villages in Sumatra to lands that are home to Indigenous tribes in Brazil. “In countries like Brazil and Malaysia, deforestation contributes to over 70 percent of their total greenhouse gas emissions,” says Bourhan Yassin, Rainforest’s CEO. “It’s a very large problem.”
Prior to working with Swarm, Rainforest relied on cellular networks to transmit data. While quicker, that limited its monitoring to regions near populated areas. “With Swarm, we can put the devices anywhere we want,” says Yassin. “It’s doubled up the capability we can do.”
Gai Jorayev at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, meanwhile, is using imagery from a constellation of more than 200 satellites run by the California firm Planet Labs to track Russia’s shelling of archaeological sites in Ukraine. Planet’s satellites take images of the entire Earth every day. This has enabled Jorayev, working with the Global Heritage Fund in California, to find that more than 165 sites have been damaged or destroyed by Russian shelling.
“Almost everywhere I look, I’m surprised by the levels of damage,” says Jorayev. “I did not expect it at this scale. The damage is very, very bad.”
Planet has provided its imagery free of charge to Jorayev and his team. “I’m exceptionally grateful,” says Jorayev. The hope is that Russia can be held accountable for its actions in future. That, however, “is a long process,” he says.
These are just a handful of ways satellite constellations are being used today: Spire says it has more than 700 customers, Planet also 700, and Swarm about 300. Concerns about collisions and the satellites’ potential to create space junk are well founded, but if we can find ways to adequately supervise these constellations, there are many ways they can prove useful.
“There are important roles that large constellations can play,” says McDowell. “It’s a question of managing it, and not having it be a free-for-all.”
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Read More »‘Fitbit For Whales’ and Other Tagging Tech Help Reshape Wildlife Conservation
August 19th, 2022
Via Mongabay, a look at how a ‘Fitbit for whales’ and other tagging tech are helping to reshape wildlife conservation:
When Alexandra Ross started her study on bridled nail-tail wallabies in central Queensland in Australia in 2017, the wildlife ecologist had a pressing concern. The species was already categorized as endangered by the Australian government, and a previous study had shown that these pint-sized kangaroo cousins (Onychogalea fraenata) panicked when they were fitted with heavy radio collars. Even worse, the collars sometimes got hooked onto a tree or a fence, choking the animal to death.
“Losing even one would be really bad,” Ross tells Mongabay in a video interview. “So we had to figure out a way to let them not get choked.”
With a lean budget making the purchase of expensive collars difficult, Ross went on to make a DIY collar. She attached a radio transmitter to an elastic cat collar with the help of small cables and super glue. The easily available cat collars were light and designed for long-term use. Their elastic nature made them easier for the wallabies to wriggle out of without choking. The results from her study, published in the journal Australian Mammalogy in 2021, showed that 25 out of the 39 collars she attached to wallabies remained in place for more than four months. Two wallabies were found to be agitated, but the study determined that other factors, including pouching of young ones, also played a role in causing that stress.
Ross says her collar could be replicated for any species with a neck. The goal, she says, is to reduce stress and injuries to animals during research or conservation activities. “Everything we do as scientists is intrusive,” she says. “But we are trying to be as minimally intrusive as possible with the end goal of helping them.”
Ross’s relatively cheap and ingenious collar is part of an ever-evolving generation of tagging and tracking devices used to study and protect wildlife. While her design might lie at the rough end of the spectrum, more advanced innovations are also being increasingly developed and deployed at the more refined end. The use of widely available consumer technology in many of them means they can potentially be scaled up and adapted for use across many different species of animals.
Estimating the impact on animals from the tagging techniques used to keep track of them is a tough task because there aren’t extensive studies on the subject. A 2011 study published in the journal Wildlife Research found that there is a “preponderance of studies focused on short-term effects, such as injuries and behavioral changes,” that tagging and marking techniques have on animals—including pain, impact on maternal attendance, and duration of foraging trips. While the techniques were not found to affect survival, the study found that “no published research has addressed other possible long-term effects.”
Despite the lack of research, conservation scientists and experts advocate the need to keep adopting newer methodologies and technologies to reduce any impact their work might have on animals. Biologist L. David Mech has been studying wolves (Canis lupus) in North America since 1958 and has seen firsthand how the development of new technology has reshaped the study and conservation of wildlife.
“When the first radio [transmitter] was put on animals in the 1960s, it was totally revolutionary and changed wildlife research tremendously by orders of magnitude,” he tells Mongabay in a video call.
Early on in his career, Mech says, it was impossible to locate a specific wolf. But that changed in November 1968 when he took a flight to track the first wolf he had fitted with a radio collar. “Suddenly, I merely listened to a ‘beep beep beep’ radio signal, and lo and behold, down below was the wolf I had collared,” he says. “It was a virtual miracle in research terms.”
With the advent of more cutting-edge technology in recent years, Mech says there’s a perpetual need to keep updating the methods used in conservation to minimize the trauma they might cause to animals.
“There are still a great deal of things we don’t know about many species, and that will require even newer types of technology,” he says.
Progress is well underway. Much like how technology that was developed for human use—like radio transmission and GPS—has proved useful for research, tracking, and conservation in the past, newer consumer technology innovations are also trickling down into the study of wildlife.
Marine conservationist David Haas calls the product he developed “Fitbit for whales.” Haas developed the FaunaTag with engineer and collaborator Sam Kelly as part of his Ph.D. work, which studied how dolphins respond physiologically when they dive into the depths of the ocean. The multisensor device measures movement, acoustics, depth of travel, along with physiological factors such as heart rate, cardiac energetics, and blood oxygen level. Tags for dolphins and whales are typically dart-like, embedded in the animal’s fin or its body. But for the FaunaTag, Haas uses a suction cup to ensure that the device is as minimally intrusive as possible. “We wanted to develop noninvasive tag technology that could add to the suite of existing sensor devices, but one that could also give us some idea of what was going on with the animal’s physiology,” he tells Mongabay in a video interview.
Despite possibly being one of the very few noninvasive devices that measure multiple parameters, adapting the technology used in consumer wearables like the Apple Watch and Fitbit wasn’t an easy feat. “It’s really easy to use light to measure physiology in humans, but it’s incredibly challenging to solve that problem in dolphins and whales,” Haas says. “You are already talking about one of the hardest animals to collect physiological data on, because of their incredibly thick skin, thick blubber layers, and blood vessels.”
The parameters measured by the FaunaTag in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops spp.) were found to be consistent with measurements made in previous studies using more invasive tags. Haas and his partner are now developing a new version of the product meant for terrestrial animals. They also continue to do more clinical validation for the products, as they await the start of manufacturing and market launch, both currently stalled by the ongoing global supply chain crisis.
While he says he’s excited at the prospect of adapting consumer technology for use in the study and conservation of wildlife, Haas also warns about the challenges that come with it. Among the many hurdles, such devices need to be built to withstand harsh wild environments—a far cry from what consumer wearables are normally subjected to. Additionally, absence of WiFi or cellular network coverage in the wild poses communication issues that aren’t usually a concern in human physiological tracking devices, at least not for a prolonged period of time.
“We spent the last four years running up against the challenges of applying human medical sensor technology to animals,” Haas says. “People should and will try it, but the challenges are non-trivial.”
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