Illuminating Global Fishing Activity With Satellite Tracking
July 18th, 2020
Via Spire, a look at how satellite data can be used to promote ocean sustainability:
In February this year, a Vietnamese ship entered Indonesian waters, likely fished illegally, and then returned to port without consequence. By March, it was back at sea. There were no signs to indicate that the vessel had raised suspicion, even though it had been making the same voyage since 2019. But it had in fact been spotted. Using satellite tracking data, experts at Global Fishing Watch had pieced together a history of the vessel’s every move—they’d uncovered suspicious behavior that would have otherwise continued unnoticed.
Global Fishing Watch (GFW)—an international, independent non-profit—has pioneered the use of technology to advance ocean sustainability through increased transparency. Its key resource for detecting illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing is satellite automatic identification system (AIS) tracking data collected by Spire Global. And with sophisticated data analytics, the organization is revolutionizing how fishing activity is monitored.
“Having the low-cost, global coverage that you get with the Spire satellite AIS completely transforms our ability to understand what’s going on out there,” said Paul Woods, GFW’s chief innovation officer. “We also benefit from a dynamic environment where we can interact with the data and collaborate with Spire on how we are going to use it in an open way.”
“The inspiring ways in which Global Fishing Watch uses maritime activity information fuels our enthusiasm to uncover more data-driven innovation,” said Max Abouchar, a sales engineer and data analyst at Spire.
Historically, vessels simply disappeared from oversight once they ventured far from shore and then submitted fishing logs when they returned to port. Not a good system for building trust, to say the least. GFW and Spire’s partnership, however, has helped build a comprehensive picture of commercial fishing activity around the world. A feat not possible a decade ago.
“Everybody has been so used to just not knowing,” said Mr. Woods. “When you bring this data in and actually quantify and measure all these things by directly observing it with AIS, it just completely changes the way people think about what questions to ask.”
AIS uses onboard GPS-like transponders, about the size of a laptop, that regularly broadcast vessel location, identity, speed, and other critical information to nearby ships, as well as to terrestrial and satellite receivers. While the International Maritime Organization first adopted AIS to prevent collisions and boost overall sea safety, it turned out to be an invaluable system for monitoring compliance and tracking suspicious fishing behavior globally. The Vietnamese vessel, for example, transmitted its location during the weeks it spent in Indonesian waters, leaving a trail of digital breadcrumbs.
“These detailed tracking data have the potential to provide estimates of fishing activity and effort in near real-time,” according to a sweeping study published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
Monitoring vast oceans needs big data analytics
Today, nearly three million fishing vessels operate across the seas, of which 60,000—mostly larger vessels—sail with AIS broadcasting capabilities. Before the GFW and Spire partnership, tracking this fleet outside the range of terrestrial receivers could be spotty and infrequent. To overcome these limitations and enhance visibility, GFW turned to Spire for its expansive constellation of nanosatellites and innovative solutions.
Spire’s nanosatellites, each about the size of a bread loaf, whiz around the planet collecting AIS data and observing atmospheric, sea, and earth conditions. The distributed constellation ensures satellite coverage across the oceans. And because each satellite completes a revolution in about 90 minutes, the overall group collects multiple observations of each location a day. Spire even developed Dynamic AIS coverage to improve monitoring in high-traffic zones, where individual vessel broadcasts can be lost in the noise of thousands of ships transmitting AIS data at once.
“The satellite AIS fills in coverage and turns it into a comprehensive product instead of this niche, spotty little thing,” said Mr. Woods.
The two organizations partnered in 2017, and GFW started consuming Spire’s total AIS feed. When it uploaded the data to its interactive, public map, which visualizes the world’s fishing activity, the chart lit up.
“It was pretty spectacular, it filled right in. Some of the areas where we had the greatest problems showed the greatest benefit,” said Mr. Woods. “It made everything twice as good, instantly.”
Continuing the success, the two organizations grew together. As Spire launched more satellites, GFW received additional information. Today, GFW processes up to 60 million data points a day from over 300,000 fishing and non-fishing vessels, up from about 3 million data points and 100,000 ships in 2012.
By channeling this data into advanced data analytics, GFW has been able to develop powerful monitoring tools. More specifically, it used machine learning to build two models for identifying patterns within the large datasets. One classifies fishing vessels and the gear they use, which is regulated. The other identifies when and where a ship fished, not just where it traveled.
The combined system can automatically spot fishing vessels within the vast volume of data, estimate their fishing history, and flag suspicious behavior. With it, GFW has created an extensive record of global fishing operations. Monitoring has come a long way from self-reported logs lingering in filing cabinets.
These analytics quickly created impacts. In 2019, for example, GFW helped the United States Coast Guard identify eight times as many violations during IUU fishing patrols compared to the previous year, 25 of which were grave enough to “severely impact fisheries.”
Charting a course to complete transparency
“Once we got the data feed going in and it got better and better, the next thing we wanted to do was start to use the data for more operations,” said Mr. Woods.
To gain even greater transparency, GFW extended its use of AIS data to study the supply network of fishing vessels. Carrier ships often resupply fishing vessels and also offload catch at sea, a process known as transshipment. This allows some fishing vessels to stay at sea for months or years. But it’s also exploited by criminal operators to hide slave labor and illegal catches.
“It’s a way for them to get around reporting and do nefarious things,” said David Kroodsma, GFW’s director of research and innovation, “so it’s important for it to be transparent and tracked.”
By studying AIS tracks of supply network ships, GFW created models to identify transshipment encounters and collect data on a practice that has long avoided oversight. “Already it has been used to identify vessels potentially involved in catching sharks that were illegally transported through the Galapagos,” wrote Nate Miller, a data scientist who works with GFW.
The solutions kept coming.
Some ships broadcast false location data to avoid policing, making it look like they are far from their actual position, a practice known as location spoofing. But because Spire can provide a complete data history, including the locations of its satellites collecting AIS information, GFW has been able to reveal this masking behavior.
The solution works by looking for discrepancies between AIS data transmitted from ships and the location of the receiving satellite. If a satellite over the Bay of Bengal, for example, captures AIS data from a ship reporting a location in the Bering Sea, it’s possible the ship is concealing its real position.
Pushing the bounds of possibility even further, GFW is now using AIS to help model the total sound emitted by ships around the world to create a noise map of the ocean.
All of these cutting-edge solutions were born from the combined power of AIS transponders and nanosatellite receivers—significant results from such small devices—but it took more than technology to cultivate their success.
Going farther together
“Global Fishing Watch was one of our first customers,” said Simon van den Dries, senior sales director of global data services at Spire. “It immediately recognized the possibilities that maritime data possesses.”
Since then, the pair have enjoyed a flexible and nimble partnership that fosters innovation. GFW’s experts approach Spire’s engineers with ideas and ambitions, and together the teams design practical solutions that help ensure sustainability across our oceans.
“With the new space approach that Spire takes and the rapid growth of their constellation, and coverage that comes from it, we’ve been able to discover much more potential,” said Mr. Woods. “It’s been eye-opening for us, we keep being amazed at the scope of the potential. There are so many things that are obvious to us now that we never thought of three or four years ago.”
And more is still to come.
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Read More »Harnessing Collective Intelligence For Conservation
July 11th, 2020
Via Ecological Society of America, an abstract of an interesting look at the potential for crowdsourcing intelligence to improve decision making around conservation:
Incorporating relevant stakeholder input into conservation decision making is fundamentally challenging yet critical for understanding both the status of, and human pressures on, natural resources. Collective intelligence (CI ), defined as the ability of a group to accomplish difficult tasks more effectively than individuals, is a growing area of investigation, with implications for improving ecological decision making. However, many questions remain about the ways in which emerging internet technologies can be used to apply CI to natural resource management. We examined how synchronous social?swarming technologies and asynchronous “wisdom of crowds” techniques can be used as potential conservation tools for estimating the status of natural resources exploited by humans. Using an example from a recreational fishery, we show that the CI of a group of anglers can be harnessed through cyber?enabled technologies. We demonstrate how such approaches – as compared against empirical data – could provide surprisingly accurate estimates that align with formal scientific estimates. Finally, we offer a practical approach for using resource stakeholders to assist in managing ecosystems, especially in data?poor situations.
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Read More »NASA Satellite Data and Analysis Can Make Earth Better
July 6th, 2020
Via Seed Daily, a look at how NASA satellite data and analysis can make the Earth better:
The number of illegal gold mines in the Amazon is increasing so fast that activists have turned to satellite imagery to identify them. Still, with thousands of new mines a year, the work was overwhelming scientists at Earthrise Alliance – they needed more hands on deck. That’s how ninth graders in Weston, Massachusetts, began locating illegal mining activity in Brazil’s protected Yanomami territory.
Earthrise is one of numerous organizations getting Earth-observation images, data, and analysis – much of which NASA makes available for free – into the hands of people working on sustainability projects. These efforts by many different aid groups are tracking illegal mining, deforestation, and groundwater resources and informing the decisions of small farmers and governments trying to support them in regions that are feeling the worst effects of climate change.
Earthrise was working with Survival International, a group that has been reporting on illegal mines in the Yanomami territory for years. Miners bring disease, like malaria and tuberculosis, which can devastate local tribes that have had little contact with people outside their communities, according to Survival International. The highly contagious novel coronavirus now also threatens the region. In addition, the mines themselves pollute the land and waterways with mercury and other toxic substances.
Earthrise illustrated a striking rise in the number of new mines in the area in a graphic for Survival International. A few months later, shortly before schools across the United States closed in early 2020 amid the global pandemic, Earthrise asked Weston High School freshmen to comb Earth-observation data for environmental stories.
Examining satellite imagery from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the company Maxar Technologies, the students identified previously unreported illegal mines. The program is part of the Earthrise Education initiative, which provides students with an internet-based tool to use satellite imagery to investigate real problems that are in the news.
Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Earthrise Alliance was founded in 2019 by former NASA officials as a merging of several projects that were using space resources to improve environmental conditions on Earth. The organization’s chief technology officer, Dan Hammer, previously worked as a presidential innovation fellow with NASA’s chief technology officer for information technology, where he made NASA data more accessible to the public.
“We offer additional perspective, which was the idea of Earthrise in the first place,” said Hammer, referring to the Apollo 8 photo for which the organization is named. Taken during the first crewed mission into lunar orbit, the photo shows Earth rising over the Moon’s horizon, giving humanity a first glimpse of the home planet from another celestial body.
“That original image alone was able to shift perspective for a lot of people,” Hammer said. “We’re offering that perspective for emerging news events, the spaceship Earth perspective.”
Self-Reflection
NASA has been looking back at Earth since the agency was established. In 1960, the agency began sending satellites into orbit to capture Earth images to improve weather predictions and maps. In 1961, Alan Shepard caught a view of Earth as the first American in suborbital space with Project Mercury.
Astronauts in the Apollo program in the 1960s and ’70s received photography training, not only to learn how to use the equipment, like cameras bracket-mounted to their spacesuits, but also to develop an eye for science images. These efforts led to the Earthrise photo and other famous images, including the iconic Blue Marble shot.
Images from these early Mercury and Apollo missions were the inspiration for the Landsat Program, which in 1972 launched the first satellite tasked specifically with observing and collecting data on Earth’s landmasses. The program has been in continuous operation since then, in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey, which currently operates Landsat 8.
Today NASA has a fleet of satellites gathering Earth data, in addition to ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. Other governments and private companies have billions of dollars’ worth of satellites looking back at Earth. NASA also has the resources to process this data and develop predictive models and analysis.
The agency makes its Earth data available for free to the public. In some cases, organizations are working directly with NASA, benefiting from the agency’s computing power, modeling, and analysis. Organizations can also access the rapidly increasing Earth-observation data from the space agency and other governments and companies around the world.
Striking Gold, Helping Farmers
The problem of illegal gold mines isn’t unique to Brazil. It’s a global phenomenon that gets worse when gold prices rise.
In Ghana, environmental officials used Landsat data and algorithms developed by NASA to identify hotspots of illegal mining activity and revoke licenses from scores of companies collecting gold while avoiding environmental oversight and taxes.
Davis Adieno, who oversees the collaboration from Nairobi, Kenya, where he is program director for the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, said the project is also forward-looking.
“The Ghanaian government is using this data to communicate the impact of illegal mines, but also, more importantly, how areas that have already been impacted could be recovered,” he said.
Working with the Global Partnership and other partners, NASA’s Brian Killough produced the initial data cube platform for five African countries – Ghana, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Tanzania – tailoring it to specific projects and training initial users. The successful model has now been scaled up for Digital Earth Africa, which makes free Earth-observation data available and usable in an increasing number of countries across the continent.
Data cubes are stacks of satellite data configured to allow the use of powerful cloud computing and rapid analyses, Killough explained. Satellite data from many days or years can be organized into a cube, with dimensions of space (latitude and longitude) and time. These cubes are made of small pixels that hold data at a scale of 30-meters – about the size of a baseball diamond – which is Landsat’s resolution. Once in a cube, it is much easier to analyze and apply the data.
Killough and his team at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, work directly with the users of the data resources they’ve created.
“We help them interpret the data and adjust the tools for their needs,” he said. “We also conduct training in each country, where we give people an understanding of the data and tools and let them use it on their own.”
Adieno said Killough “introduced what is possible – what type of data is available, the duration, what you can actually do with the infrastructure, with the algorithms that are available – which helped the countries identify who was best-placed to use it.”
In most cases, the satellite data tools are being used by people who have already been working with satellite imagery, but with less powerful capabilities and extremely cumbersome and often untenable downloading and processing times.
Adieno said officials in Senegal purchased private data for their project but then later moved to the data cube infrastructure for their analysis. “The results were more or less the same, which means they didn’t need to spend that money,” Davis said. “The value here is access to free, open source satellite data that’s analysis-ready.”
Killough agreed. “People in the developing countries we’ve been working with recognize that satellite data could have a huge impact,” he says. “But they have struggled with the preparation and the understanding of how to directly apply it to their applications. That’s where I think we’ve made great progress.”
The data resources are “certainly very efficient and effective,” said Victor Addabor, who heads Ghana’s National Disaster Management Organization.
Addabor worked with Killough to use Landsat data to identify the rate at which small farmers in the country’s north are adopting new growing techniques, like using drought-resistant seeds. This type of information helps the government determine the best ways to support small farmers in remote areas who are making decisions individually while also playing a major role in the country’s food security.
“That One Right Decision”
Indeed, unlike large agricultural producers in Europe and the United States, the vast majority of farmers around the world are working small plots of land, feeding much of Earth’s population without coordination. These farmers are disproportionately affected by decreasing water resources and rising temperatures
“In many places, if farmers don’t make that one right decision, it can mean the whole year is incredibly challenging for them. It can mean that the kids don’t go to school or families don’t have enough to eat,” said Eliot Levine, director of the Environment Technical Support Unit at Mercy Corps.
The Portland-based organization has been providing humanitarian relief around the world for decades and, more recently, is working with NASA on a partnership that uses satellite data to support science-informed policy and sometimes deliver information directly to people who need it.
Mercy Corps and NASA are collaborating in Kenya to reach farmers with a combination of precise weather and agronomic information. The work is part of Mercy Corps’ AgriFin program, which focuses on building the capacities of smallholder farmers, using cellphones and texting technology to deliver information about weather forecasts, seed types, financial products, market prices, and other relevant resources.
“Through our partnership with NASA, we are providing farmers with information and tools they have never had access to before,” Levine said.
“Should you plant now or wait? Water now or wait because rain is coming? Farmers need access to information,” Levine said. “We envision a future where every small-holder farmer prospers in a digitally interconnected world.”
The effort is part of a growing collaboration between NASA and Mercy Corps, a partnership that began in 2015 with an early project to map groundwater resources in Niger and was formalized in 2019 with a Space Act Agreement.
Shanna McClain, global partnerships manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said the agency was looking to “engage with partners that it hasn’t worked with in the past in the hope of achieving new ways of understanding complex human and environmental challenges.”
As the collaboration with Mercy Corps matured, McClain and Levine saw increasing possibilities for future work, as they had hoped they would.
“We didn’t just want to work with a new type of partner,” McClain said. “We wanted to see the magic that comes only from partnership.”
The formal agreement “essentially helps recognize our interest in doing this work as a shared endeavor,” she said, noting no money is changing hands. “We’re putting in an equal amount of funding and capacity.”
NASA scientists have worked with Mercy Corps from their desks and at the sites of international projects. The agency provides Earth science insights, in addition to data and analysis that Mercy Corps wouldn’t be able to produce on its own.
Together, NASA and Mercy Corps are helping to strengthen the resilience of communities around the world.
Earth Data for Earth
Earthrise estimates that more than half a trillion dollars has been spent on public and private satellites looking back at our own planet, primarily for military intelligence and profit-driven fields like commodity trading.
Earthrise, along with Digital Earth Africa and Mercy Corps, is repurposing this technology.
“There’s value that filters down when you’re fundamentally aware,” said Earthrise’s Hammer. “We’re leveraging the hundreds of billions of dollars of existing investment for Earth literacy.”
With Earth-observation data, people can assess how their own lands are changing and what they can do to alter the direction of the change.
“Satellite data can be complex,” NASA’s Killough noted. “Making the data accessible and useable gives the local users more power to control their future.
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Read More »Scientists Use An Internet of Animals To Track and Save Wildlife
June 12th, 2020
Via The New York Times, an interesting report on how – through the use of tiny sensors and equipment aboard the space station – a project called ICARUS seeks to revolutionize animal tracking:
The International Space Station, orbiting some 240 miles above the planet, is about to join the effort to monitor the world’s wildlife — and to revolutionize the science of animal tracking.
A large antenna and other equipment aboard the orbiting outpost, installed by spacewalking Russian astronauts in 2018, are being tested and will become fully operational this summer. The system will relay a much wider range of data than previous tracking technologies, logging not just an animal’s location but also its physiology and environment. This will assist scientists, conservationists and others whose work requires close monitoring of wildlife on the move, and provide much more detailed information on the health of the world’s ecosystems.
The new approach, known as ICARUS — short for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space — will also be able to track animals across far larger areas than other technologies. At the same time, ICARUS has shrunk the size of the transmitters that the animals wear and made them far cheaper to boot.
These changes will allow researchers to track flocks of birds as they migrate over long distances, for instance, instead of monitoring only one or two birds at a time, as well as far smaller creatures, including insects. And, as climate change and habitat destruction roil the planet, ICARUS will allow biologists and wildlife managers to quickly respond to changes in where and when species migrate.
“It’s a new era of discovery,” said Walter Jetz, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, whose center is working with the project. “We will discover new migration paths, habitat requirements, things about species behavior that we didn’t even think about. That discovery will bring about all sorts of new questions.”
As an added bonus, people all over the world will one day be able to log on with a smartphone app to what’s known as the internet of animals to follow their favorite bird or tortoise or fish as it migrates and is tracked by the space station practically in real time.
The science of wildlife tracking, known as bio-logging, has come a long way in recent years. In the 1990s, researchers were still tracking large mammals using devices the size of lantern batteries. The technology has grown smaller since then, but many collars and tags are still too big for some three-quarters of the world’s wild creatures.
This space-based approach to uncovering the hidden lives of animals is led by Martin Wikelski, the director of migration research at the Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Germany, who pursued it with a passion for years to overcome gaps and drawbacks in current technologies. It has been funded primarily by DLR, the German space agency.
ICARUS combines off-the-shelf technology, which includes solar and GPS units, and new communication technology that was developed for this mission, and specifically designed for tracking small animals.
On the ground, researchers will attach solar-powered bio-loggers that are far smaller than other technology — the size of two fingernails. They weigh less than three grams, about one-tenth of an ounce, and technicians say they will soon have one gram trackers.
Once secured — an easy process that seldom harms the animal — the sensors will hitch a ride on an array of animals and insects, like locusts, songbirds and baby tortoises. Most current wildlife tracking technologies can’t be attached to creatures that weigh less than 100 grams, or about three and a half ounces. And while the new sensors are smaller and lighter, their advanced design will allow them to collect far more data by monitoring an animal’s physiology, including skin temperature and body position, and external conditions like weather metrics.
The technology can also be used to accomplish a range of goals beyond wildlife studies.
Dr. Wikelski has studied the ability of cows, domestic goats and sheep in Italy to sense earthquakes and volcanic eruptions hours before they happen. Behavioral changes can be picked up by the sensors, he said, so herd behavior may provide an early warning.
“We think something smells wrong to them and there is static in the air,” he said. “So they move into wooded areas where they have shelter.”
Why the animals react is not yet known.
Icarus could also help track elephants vulnerable to poaching in Africa, or keep tabs on species of bats, pangolins and other animals that have played a role in viral epidemics.
“With skin temperature we can see in the ducks in China whether the next avian influenza is starting,” Dr. Wikelski said.
The power of this new approach is partially based on the fact that the space station can pick up the signals of these animals almost anywhere on the planet (the station does not pass over Earth’s polar regions, however). And while other conservation projects have tracked sharks, birds and other migratory species with satellites, this one aims to be useful for a wide range of species that researchers can ask to have added.
The sensors it relies on, at about $500 each, are a fraction of the price of other widely used tags.
They can last an animal’s lifetime and even be reused. They are able to store up to 500 megabytes, an entire lifetime of data on an animal. A researcher need not retrieve the tag; its data can be downloaded with a computer or a smartphone.
ICARUS “will truly change the study of animal migration,” said Nathan Senner, a biologist at the University of South Carolina. He plans to use it for a study tracking the Hudsonian godwit, a shorebird that makes one of the world’s longest migrations, from southern Chile to Alaska.
“We could get location estimates that are much more precise and help us develop targeted on the ground conservation measures,” Dr. Senner said.
In Europe, studies show some 30 percent of migratory songbirds, or about 420 million, have disappeared. ICARUS may give a much more detailed answer to where and why the animals are dying and guide conservation measures.
Dr. Wikelski said he was asked by a farmer in the German village where he grew up why there were no swallows this year.
“It’s hard to say,” Dr. Wikelski said. “Did they die on the way south? Were they eaten in the Mediterranean? Were they hunted in North Africa? Were they poisoned in the Sahel? Was the weather really bad? Those are the kinds of things we will find out.”
ICARUS will provide data on an individual bird, as well as a collective. In a study by Dr. Wikelski and others at Max Planck Institute, researchers are tagging 1,200 blackbirds in the hopes of better understanding the timing and route of their travels and where and why their numbers are declining.
In the Galápagos Islands, sensors will be used on baby tortoises to track their migration, a project of the Galápagos Tortoise Movement Ecology Programme.
“No one knows how the hatchlings survive,” said Dr. Wikelski, who works with the program. “Those are the lost years of the sea turtles. Knowing where they go will allow us to protect them better.”
Because ICARUS has the capability of tagging many more animals than other technologies do, Dr. Wikelski likened it to a smartphone traffic app that can track many cars on a highway at once. One phone can provide a lot of information about one car, but many phones sending information to one app can offer information about traffic patterns.
One of the goals of the project, Dr. Wikelski said, is to help conservation managers respond to a changing world. Protected areas like wildlife parks and forest preserves are defined by fixed boundaries. But many species are on the move as climate and other changes cause shifts, and protecting them will require an understanding of where they are going and where new protected areas and corridors may need to be created.
The system will be open to researchers around the world to use for research. And the data, with some exceptions, will be accessible to everyone. Dr. Wikelski said readings from ICARUS could be combined with other kinds of information, such as the eBird database, to make the data even more robust.
Another ambition of ICARUS is to allow anyone with a smartphone to follow tagged migrating animals. One app, called Animal Tracker, already exists as a way to tap into ground-based wildlife tracking systems.
Dr. Wikelski hopes that connecting people to a single charismatic animal whose movements they can follow will build support for conservation. “If people hear Cecil the lion died it’s very real to them,” he said, referring to a lion in Zimbabwe that was killed by an American hunter in 2015. “But if you say 3,000 lions died nobody cares.”
Mark Hebblewhite, a wildlife biologist at the University of Montana who has used wildlife tracking technology for decades, said ICARUS would have the capacity to fill in many gaps in our knowledge of the natural world.
“We’ll get a lot of things from ICARUS we can’t get any other way,” he said. “It’s exciting.”
But technology has downsides as well, he said. Birds may suddenly and unpredictably change their migration, for example, after years of traveling the same way, and Dr. Hebblewhite said there was a danger that conservation decisions could be made by people “who don’t know anything about birds except dots on a map.”
Some might say nature should maintain a degree of mystery from an all-seeing eye in the sky, but Dr. Wikelski, not surprisingly, doesn’t agree.
“These animals are providing really important information, maybe for survival of humankind,” he said. “We should have this information.”
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Read More »New Satellite-Based Algorithm Pinpoints Crop Water Use
March 21st, 2020
Via Eurasia View, a report on a new satellite-based algorithm which can pinpoint crop water use:
The growing threat of drought and rising water demand have made accurate forecasts of crop water use critical for farmland water management and sustainability. But limitations in existing models and satellite data pose challenges for precise estimates of evapotranspiration — a combination of evaporation from soil and transpiration from plants. The process is complex and difficult to model, and existing remote-sensing data can’t provide accurate, high-resolution information on a daily basis.
A new high-resolution mapping framework called BESS-STAIR promises to do just that, around the globe. BESS-STAIR is composed of a satellite-driven biophysical model integrating plants’ water, carbon and energy cycles — the Breathing Earth System Simulator (BESS) — with a generic and fully automated fusion algorithm called STAIR (SaTellite dAta IntegRation).
The framework, developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was tested in 12 sites across the U.S. Corn Belt, and its estimates have achieved the highest performance reported in any academic study so far.
The study, published in the European Geosciences Union’s Hydrology and Earth System Sciences journal, was led by CABBI’s Postdoctoral Research Associate Chongya Jiang and project lead Kaiyu Guan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) and a Blue Waters Professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
“BESS-STAIR has great potential to be a reliable tool for water resources management and precision agriculture applications for the U.S. Corn Belt and even worldwide, given the global coverage of its input data,” Jiang said.
Traditional remote-sensing methods for estimating evapotranspiration rely heavily on thermal radiation data, which measure the temperature of the plant canopy and soil as they cool through evaporation. But those methods have two drawbacks: the satellites can’t collect data on surface temperatures on cloudy days; and the temperature data aren’t very accurate, which in turn affects the accuracy of the evapotranspiration estimates, Jiang said.
The CABBI team instead focused on the plant’s carbon-water-energy cycles. Plants transpire water into the atmosphere through holes on their leaves called stomata. As the water goes out, carbon dioxide comes in, allowing the plant to conduct photosynthesis and form biomass.
The BESS-STAIR model first estimates photosynthesis, then the amount of carbon and water going in and out. Previous remote-sensing methods did not consider the carbon component as a constraint, Jiang said. “That’s the advance of this model.”
Another advantage: Surface temperature-based methods can only collect data under clear skies, so they have to interpolate evapotranspiration for cloudy days, creating gaps in the data, according to Jiang. The all-weather BESS-STAIR model uses surface reflectance, which is similar on clear and cloudy days, eliminating any gaps.
The STAIR algorithm fused data from two complementary satellite systems — Landsat and MODIS — to provide high-resolution data on a daily basis, providing both high spatial and high temporal resolution. Landsat collects detailed information about Earth’s land every eight to 16 days; MODIS provides a complete picture of the globe every day to capture more rapid land surface changes.
This isn’t the first time researchers have combined data from the two satellite sensors, but previous methods only worked in a small region over a short time period, Guan said. The previous algorithms were difficult to scale up and weren’t fully automatic, requiring significant human input, and they couldn’t be applied across broad areas over a longer time period.
By contrast, the CABBI team’s framework was evaluated in different regions across the U.S. Corn Belt over two decades, Jiang said. Researchers built a pipeline on NCSA’s supercomputer to automatically estimate surface reflectance as well as evapotranspiration on a large scale for extended time periods. Using data from 2000 to 2017, the team applied BESS-STAIR in 12 sites across the Corn Belt, comprehensively validating its evapotranspiration estimates with flux tower measurements at each site. They measured overall accuracy as well as spatial, seasonal, and interannual variations.
“We are able to provide daily, 30m-resolution evapotranspiration anytime and anywhere in the U.S. Corn Belt in hours, which is unprecedented,” Guan said.
The breakthrough will have real-time, practical benefits for U.S. farmers coping with the increasing severity of droughts, as documented in a number of recent studies.
“Precision agriculture is one of our major targets. Evapotranspiration is very important for irrigation and also very important to water management,” Guan said. “This is a solution that goes beyond experimental plots and impacts the real world, for millions of fields everywhere.”
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Read More »Animal Borne Sensors Could Help Humans Monitor Oceans
December 2nd, 2019
Via Terra Daily, a look at the potential for animal borne sensors to contribute to our understanding of the natural world around us:
Sharks, penguins, turtles and other seagoing species could help humans monitor the oceans by transmitting oceanographic information from electronic tags.
Thousands of marine animals are tagged for a variety of research and conservation purposes, but at present the information gathered isn’t widely used to track climate change and other shifts in the oceans.
Instead, monitoring is mostly done by research vessels, underwater drones and thousands of floating sensors that drift with the currents. However, large areas of the ocean still remain under-sampled – leaving gaps in our knowledge.
A team led by the University of Exeter says animals carrying sensors can fill many of these gaps through natural behaviour such as diving under ice, swimming in shallow water or moving against currents.
“We want to highlight the massive potential of animal-borne sensors to teach us about the oceans,” said lead author Dr David March, of Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall.
“This is already happening on a limited scale, but there’s scope for much more.
“We looked at 183 species – including tuna, sharks, rays, whales and flying seabirds – and the areas they are known to inhabit.
“We have processed more than 1.5 million measurements from floating sensors to identify poorly sampled areas (18.6% of the global ocean surface).”
“By comparing this with gaps in current observations by drifting profiling sensors (known as Argo floats) we identified poorly sampled areas where data from animal sensors would help fill gaps,” said Professor Brendan Godley, who leads Exeter Marine.
“These include seas near the poles (above 60+ latitude) and shallow and coastal areas where Argo profilers are at risk of hitting the land.
“The Caribbean and seas around Indonesia, as well as other semi-enclosed seas, are good examples of places where Argo profilers struggle because of these problems.”
Tagged seals in the poles have already complemented ocean observing systems because they can reach areas under ice that are inaccessible to other instruments.
The study suggests data collected by turtles or sharks could also enhance ocean monitoring in other remote and critical areas such as tropical regions, with large influence on global climate variability and weather.
The researchers say their work is a call for further collaboration between ecologists and oceanographers.
Professor Godley added: “It is important to note that animal welfare is paramount and we are only suggesting that animals that are already being tracked for ethically defensible and conservation-relevant ecological research be recruited as oceanographers. We do not advocate for animals being tracked solely for oceanography.”
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