AI, Data Analytics Help Create ‘Smart Rainforest’ in Australia
February 15th, 2024
Via Environment & Energy Leader, an article on the world’s first “smart rainforest,” where artificial intelligence and data is used to advance sustainable and cost-effective environmental restoration models across the globe:
In an era where technological innovation meets environmental stewardship, NTT Group has joined forces with ClimateForce, embarking on an ambitious journey to breathe new life into the Daintree Rainforest.
This partnership is set to unveil what it calls the world’s first “smart rainforest,” using artificial intelligence and data to advance sustainable and cost-effective environmental restoration models across the globe.
Advancing Forest Restoration with Technology
At the heart of this initiative lies the Smart Management Platform (SMP) technology, developed by NTT. This innovative platform is designed to rejuvenate a section of Australia’s Daintree Rainforest, previously compromised by agricultural activities and invasive plant species. The technology’s integration promises not only to regenerate the land but also to safeguard it against future ecological threats.ClimateForce, a point of light in environmental regeneration, has taken up the mantle to restore this section of the rainforest, located adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef. With NTT’s support, the project will utilize advanced AI, data analytics, and predictive analytics to evaluate and implement organic reforestation techniques.
This strategic approach aims to protect biodiversity, mitigate climate change effects, and bolster resilient local economies.
A Shared Vision for a Sustainable Future
The collaboration between NTT is a shared vision for sustainable advances and improving biodiversity.
Barney Swan, the CEO and co-founder of ClimateForce, expressed gratitude for the support from NTT and NTT DATA, emphasizing the project’s potential to accelerate their goals and develop replicable models for ecosystem regeneration worldwide.
NTT DATA’s involvement extends beyond technological support, contributing to operational and fundraising efforts. This collaboration was sparked by a previous sponsorship of an expedition advocating for sustainable practices in Antarctica, highlighting the long-standing commitment of both organizations to environmental sustainability.
By using advanced technology and fostering international cooperation with the creation of the smart rainforest in the Daintree, NTT and ClimateForce said they hope to set a precedent for global environmental restoration efforts. This project not only aims to restore an important ecosystem but also to inspire similar initiatives in other areas across the world, according to the organizers.
“NTT DATA met Barney through our sponsorship of his father’s Undaunted: South Pole 2023 expedition, which advocated for sustainable practices and long-term protections for Antarctica,” said Bob Pryor, CEO, NTT DATA Services. “We’re excited to extend this relationship and help ClimateForce with its mission in the tropics, which perfectly aligns with our own vision for realizing a sustainable future.”
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Read More »How Technology Helps Scientists Protect Giraffes
February 7th, 2024
Via Share America, a look at how solar-powered GPS tracking devices affixed to giraffes’ ears allow conservation ecologists to remotely track animals and know when giraffes have strayed from protected areas:
Technology is helping wildlife experts in Africa to protect endangered giraffes and to reintroduce them to areas where they had previously died out.
An estimated 117,000 giraffes remain in the wild, and some species are critically endangered, having suffered from illegal hunting and habitat loss, according to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. New technologies, including AI software, are helping scientists to recognize specific giraffes based on their unique spot patterns. And satellite imagery is helping conservationists identify suitable habitats for them.
“[We] get glimpses into the lives of giraffes that we previously couldn’t see,” said Michael Brown, a conservation ecologist with the foundation. “These glimpses … inform conservation management.”
Based in Namibia, the foundation and its partners protect giraffes across 40 million hectares in 21 African countries. Giraffes live in areas ranging from lush savanna to sparse desert, and from protected wildlife refuges to lands that put the animals in close contact with people.
Along with partners, including the Virginia-based Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in the United States, the foundation uses GPS (Global Positioning System) devices to track giraffes. EarthRanger, part of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Seattle-based nonprofit, quickly transmits data to local partners, alerting them to when an animal has strayed from a protected area or stopped moving and thus may need assistance.
In August 2023, Jennifer R. Littlejohn, the U.S. Department of State’s acting assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, met with scientists working on EarthRanger in Seattle and highlighted the importance of conservationists, technologists and government working together to further use of AI and satellite imagery to solve problems facing people and nature.
The ability to recognize spot patterns, which traditionally required scores of volunteers, Brown said, helps researchers accurately count giraffe populations and better understand an animal’s behavior. U.S. researchers use similar technology to recognize North American brown bears by their facial features.
“Knowing them as individuals helps us get a much clearer picture” of how giraffes interact with their habitats, Brown said. That information helps researchers better determine where giraffe populations are likely to increase over time.
Ecologists have successfully moved giraffes to new areas, including lands where they had previously died out. Databases owned by NASA, the U.S. space agency, and by the U.S. Geological Survey provide information from satellite images to determine whether giraffes are likely to thrive. Online tools such as Google Earth also inform the analysis.
“Rapid leaps in the last decade with GPS technology and with satellite imagery,” Brown said, motivate ecologists to continue their efforts.
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Read More »The Race To Build Climate-Resilient Reefs
January 30th, 2024
Via BBC, a look at novel restoration methods that can speed up the recovery of threatened corals – but for a lasting impact, they need to be backed by action to stop ocean warming:
A new ally may help speed up the race to restore devastated coral reefs in Australia: robots, combined with mass-manufacturing techniques. Around the world, scientists are also working on other methods to help reefs recover faster and on a larger scale than before. But as corals face existential threats, including a steady increase in the intensity and duration of marine heat waves, experts warn that these solutions need to go hand in hand with action on global warming if they are to bring lasting improvements.
Taryn Foster is a coral scientist based in Western Australia and chief executive of Coral Maker, which produces small coral skeletons onto which nursery grown coral is attached. She was spurred into action by the mass bleaching she witnessed while doing research for her doctoral thesis on climate impacts on coral reefs.
“I was studying these big reefs and saw how quickly a bleaching event devastates a reef system,” says Foster. “In the space of a few weeks during one of the bleaching events, we saw around 90% coral mortality. And I was reconsidering whether or not I wanted to continue to write scientific research papers, or whether I wanted to get more involved in practical, more solutions-based work.”
The ocean absorbs 90% of the heat caused by human-driven climate change. Warming oceans are a huge problem for coral reefs as they require temperatures to stay within the range of 79-84F (26.1-28.8C) to remain healthy, grow, and reproduce. Current predictions estimate that 99% of coral could succumb to marine heatwaves by the 2030s if global temperatures continue to rise at the current rate.
This would have dramatic consequences not just for corals, but for the wider reef ecosystem. Although coral reefs only occupy 0.1% of the seafloor, 25% of all named marine species live in reef systems and an estimated one billion people benefit directly or indirectly from coral reefs. Coral ecosystems face a host of threats ranging from increasing ocean acidification to a rise in coral diseases but the steady and alarming increase in ocean surface temperatures poses the most ubiquitous and ominous problem.
Coral restoration typically involves transplanting nursery-grown coral onto the damaged reef by hand using individual divers, a very time consuming and arduous process that can be expensive and hard to do on a large scale. Foster decided that a new approach was needed to scale up coral planting, incorporating lessons from her family’s manufacturing business, such as automation and mass production.
“I was thinking we can apply some of these technologies to coral reef restoration,” says Foster. “There’s lots of parts of the process that are just pick and place, repetitive type tasks which are ideally suited to robotic automation.”
She partnered with software company Autodesk, which helped her implement automation and artificial intelligence into a process that could manufacture skeletons for coral. Foster says using artificial intelligence to program and run the robotic side of the operation allows for greater flexibily and accuracy.
“Unlike standard pre-programmed robotic systems, artificial intelligence is able to respond to the variability in coral morphology and adjust robotic movements accordingly,” says Foster.
To create corals for planting, robots work alongside humans, attaching nursery-grown coral fragments to mass-produced coral skeletons on an assembly line. The material used for the coral skeletons is rock or cement; currently Coral Maker uses recycled construction rubble.
Foster says current restoration programmes can generally restore about 2.5 acres (1 hectare) of coral reef in a year, but that once Coral Maker is fully operational it could restore around 250 acres (100 hectares) a year.
A race is also underway in the US, to save the bleached corals of the Flordia Keys Reef Tract. Florida’s coral reef system, which is the third largest in the world, is under severe threat. Now, a novel approach is boosting the survival chances of two of its primary reef-building coral species, both of which are endangered: the pale brown, pointed-antler-like staghorn (Acropora cervicornis) and the flattened-antler-like elkhorn (Acropora palmata). Both the staghorn and the elkhorn have been devastated by disease and climate change, and have seen a 97% decline in their population since the 1970s. The Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF), the world’s largest reef restoration organisation, was formed in 2005 in response to this population crash.
CRF operates coral nurseries in the ocean that grow juvenile coral, which are then transplanted to reef restoration sites in an effort to stave off the extinction of coral species and restore balance to the reef ecosystems. The corals are grown on floating, anchored trees made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) with fibreglass branches onto which coral fragments are attached with thin plastic lines. This structure allows them to grow particularly fast, says Phanor Montoya-Maya, CRF’s restoration programme manager. This is because the suspended corals are surrounded by light and waterborne nutrition and are more protected from storms and other disturbances than they would be if they were anchored to the sea floor. According to Montoya-Maya, the corals are “reef-ready” in six to nine months.
CRF’s Tavernier Coral Tree Nursery in the Florida Keys covers 1.5 acres (6,070 sq m) of ocean floor, contains more than 500 coral trees, and is capable of producing 40,000 reef-ready corals every year, the organisation says.
Even restored reefs still face the threat of global warming, however. In July 2023, a marine heat wave in Florida caused ocean temperatures to soar: in some areas ocean temperatures exceeded hot tub levels of 100F (37.7C). The bleaching threshold for coral is typically around 87F (30.5C). When water temperatures cross that red line and stay that way for a month or more, coral is stressed to such a degree that it has to expel the algae (zooxanthellae) in its tissues. This algae gives coral both its distinctive color and, in a unique symbiotic relationship, it also feeds vital nutrients to its coral host. Bleached coral can survive and eventually recover, but any recovery requires water temperatures to revert back to a less extreme range and stay that way. This past summer in Florida the heat was so extreme that in some instances the coral tissue began to dissolve, eliminating any prospect of recovery, according to CRF.
In response to the marine heat wave in July, CRF enacted an emergency plan to remove their coral trees from the nurseries and move them to land-based aquariums where the water is kept at cooler temperatures. Even with the rescue operation, CRF lost about 50% of its coral stock in its four coral tree nurseries. Much of what remains is bleached, making its recovery uncertain, CRF says.
Montoya-Maya says that CRF’s research shows a complicated picture of how individual corals respond to temperature increases.
“CRF’s research has revealed the importance of genetic diversity in coral populations,” says Montoya-Maya. “However, we have found that these responses also vary depending on specific locations and environmental conditions – no genotype displays the same responses across different locations.”
99% of coral could succumb to marine heatwaves by 2030 if global temperatures continue to rise at the current rate
Researchers at Australia’s tropical marine research agency, the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), are trying to make juvenile coral more heat-resilient by identifying and selectively breeding heat-tolerant adults and inoculating corals with heat-resilient symbiotic microalgae.“Results so far are encouraging and there is potential to increase the heat tolerance of corals to improve survival in hotter seas,” says AIMS researcher Saskia Jurriaans. “But we need to do this at scale and out of the lab in cost-effective ways.”
CARBON COUNT
The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 0kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Find out more about how we calculated this figure here.Some multinational corporations have also decided to invest in reef restoration. In 2019 the cat food brand Sheba, a subsidiary of Mars, began work on one of the world’s largest coral restoration programmes, called Hope Reef, which is located off the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia and had been heavily damaged by past blast fishing and other disruptions. Blast fishing, which uses dynamite or other explosives to kill fish, reduces the underwater landscape to shifting rubble, which doesn’t allow coral to grow.
The project uses reef stars, hexagonal steel structures, to which corals are attached, explains Jos van Oostrum, senior director of sustainable solutions at Mars. “These ‘loaded’ reef stars are interconnected underwater and anchored to the deserted rubble fields, to provide a strong stable platform for attached corals to grow. Over time, native corals settle onto the reef stars, corals grow, and the structures become fully integrated into the reef,” he says.
According to van Oostrum, coral coverage of Hope Reef has grown from 2% to 70% thanks to the project, and the fish population has increased by 260%. Sheba is expanding its coral restoration efforts to key sites around the world in Indonesia, Australia, The Maldives, Kenya, Mexico, and Costa Rica, he says. The project aims to restore more than 221,000 sq yards (185,000 sq m) of reef by 2029.
Helping corals help themselves
Not everyone in the field agrees with the premise that human-driven coral restoration is the best approach towards saving and protecting coral. Erika Woolsey, chief scientist and chief executive at the environmental non-profit The Hydrous, says that in some instances coral has shown great resilience and the ability to replenish itself without direct assistance. Woolsey points to recent research on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef which shows that coral reefs are recovering on their own from a 2022 mass bleaching event.“When you look at the impacts of reef restoration efforts it accounts for less than 1% of the whole Great Barrier Reef,” says Woolsey. “Whereas the natural cycles are replenishing huge areas which makes you really question the efficacy of rehabilitation projects.”
Woolsey isn’t opposed to novel reef restoration methods but feels that public education and creating empathy for marine environments are the salient issues.
“Reef restoration efforts can be effective in certain scenarios but all of these different approaches have yet to be proven at scale,” says Woolsey. “However, we know that to save coral reefs, we really have to combat climate change, remove local stressors, like overfishing, and prevent overgrowth of microalgae. Those are the proven solutions.”
We know that to save coral reefs, we really have to combat climate change – Erika Woolsey
Meanwhile, Foster at Coral Maker, the robot-assisted project, sees another potential function for mass-produced coral skeletons: helping corals move to cooler waters where they may be less at risk, a step known as assisted migration.“I think if we had the technology to deploy them [manufactured coral skeletons] at scale, we could consider things like assisted migration where we take corals that are in areas that are in danger, and move them further from the equator, to cooler water temperatures,” says Foster.
Since coral lacks fins or legs, it has little ability to adapt to climate change by quickly moving to cooler waters. However, assisted migration for coral is controversial in the scientific community and has not been tried at scale. One the major concerns is that the risks associated with moving coral reefs to new areas are unknown and could negatively impact the ecosystem into which it would be introduced. Transplanted coral of certain types might become invasive, or bring with it microbes that negatively affect native sea life.
“I was trained as a conservationist and you do not interfere, you don’t move things to new locations,” says Foster. “There’s always a can of worms that opens up when you do that sort of thing. But we’re dealing with an era of rapid climate change and we know that there’s a risk of not acting.”
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Read More »Decoding Animal Communication with A.I.
January 27th, 2024
Via Aspen Ideas, an interesting podcast on efforts to decode animal communication using A.I.:
Scientists could actually be close to being able to decode animal communication and figure out what animals are saying to each other. And more astonishingly, we might even find ways to talk back. The study of sonic communication in animals is relatively new, and researchers have made a lot of headway over the past few decades with recordings and human analysis. But recent advancements in artificial intelligence are opening doors to parsing animal communication in ways that haven’t been close to possible until now. In this talk from the 2023 Aspen Ideas Festival in partnership with Vox’s “Unexplainable” podcast, two experts on animal communication and the digital world come together to explain what may come next.
Tragically, a few months after this conversation was recorded in June, one of the panelists, Karen Bakker, passed away unexpectedly. Bakker was a professor at the University of British Columbia who looked at ways digital tools can address our most pressing problems. She also wrote the book “The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the World of Animals and Plants.” The UBC Geography department wrote of Bakker: “We will remember Karen as multi-faceted and superbly talented in all realms.”
Aza Raskin, the co-founder of the Earth Species Project, a nonprofit trying to decode animal communication using A.I., joined Bakker for this discussion. The host of “Unexplainable,” Noam Hassenfeld, interviewed Bakker and Raskin.
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Read More »Tidal: Alphabet X’s New Effort to Protect The Oceans
November 3rd, 2023
Via MIT Technology Review, a look at a previously unreported Alphabet X program to use cameras, computer vision, and machine learning to track the carbon stored in the biomass of the oceans:
In late September, Bianca Bahman snorkeled above a seagrass meadow off the western coast of Flores, a scorpion-shaped volcanic island in eastern Indonesia. As she flutter-kicked over the green seabed, Bahman steered an underwater camera suspended on a pair of small pontoons.
The stereoscopic camera captures high-resolution footage from two slightly different angles, creating a three-dimensional map of the ribbon-shaped leaves sprouting from the seafloor.
Bahman is a project manager for Tidal, whose team wants to use these cameras, along with computer vision and machine learning, to get a better understanding of life beneath the oceans. Tidal has used the same camera system to monitor fish in aquafarms off the coast of Norway for several years.
Now, MIT Technology Review can report, Tidal hopes its system can help preserve and restore the world’s seagrass beds, accelerating efforts to harness the oceans to suck up and store away far more carbon dioxide.
Tidal is a project within Alphabet’s X division, the so-called moonshot factory. Its mission is to improve our understanding of underwater ecosystems in order to inform and incentivize efforts to protect the oceans amid mounting threats from pollution, overfishing, ocean acidification, and global warming.
Its tools “can unlock areas that are desperately needed in the ocean world,” Bahman says.
Studies suggest the oceans could pull down a sizable share of the billions of additional tons of carbon dioxide that may need to be scrubbed from the atmosphere each year to keep temperatures in check by midcentury. But making that happen will require restoring coastal ecosystems, growing more seaweed, adding nutrients to stimulate plankton growth, or similar interventions.
Tidal decided to focus initially on seagrass because it’s a fast-growing plant that’s particularly effective at absorbing carbon dioxide from shallow waters. These coastal meadows might be able to suck up much more if communities, companies, or nonprofits take steps to expand them.
But scientists have only a rudimentary understanding of how much carbon seagrass sequesters, and how big a role the plant plays in regulating the climate. Without that knowledge and affordable ways to verify that restoration efforts actually store away more carbon, it will be tricky to track climate progress and build credible carbon credit marketplaces that would pay for such practices.
Tidal hopes to crack the problem by developing models and algorithms that translate the three-dimensional maps of seagrass it captures into reliable estimates of the carbon held below. If it works, automated versions of Tidal’s data-harvesting technology could provide that missing verification tool. This could help kick-start and lend credibility to marine-based carbon credit projects and markets, helping to restore ocean ecosystems and slow climate change.
The team envisions creating autonomous versions of its tools, possibly in the form of swimming robots equipped with its cameras, that can remotely monitor coastlines and estimate the growth or loss of biomass.
“If we can quantify and measure these systems, we can then drive investment to protect and conserve them,” says Neil Davé, the general manager of Tidal.
Still, some scientists are skeptical that Tidal’s technology will be able to accurately estimate shifting carbon levels in distant corners of the globe, among other challenges. Indeed, nature-based carbon credits have faced growing criticism: studies and reporting find that such efforts can overestimate climate benefits, create environmental risks, or present environmental justice concerns.
Davé acknowledges that they don’t know how well it will work yet. But he says that’s precisely what the Tidal team went to Indonesia, along with a group of Australian scientists, to try to find out.
Google launched what was then called Google X in early 2010, with a mandate to go after big, hard, even zany ideas that could produce the next Google.
This research division took over the self-driving-car project now known as Waymo. It developed the Google Brain machine-learning tools that power YouTube recommendations, Google Translate, and numerous other core products of its parent company. And it gave the world the Google Glass augmented-reality headset (whether the world wanted it or not). There were even short-lived flirtations with things like space elevators and teleportation.
X pursued climate-related projects from the start, but has had a very mixed track record in this area to date.
It acquired Makani, an effort to capture wind energy from large, looping kites, but the company shut down in 2020. It also pursued a project to produce carbon-neutral fuels from seawater, dubbed Foghorn, but abandoned the effort after finding it’d be too hard to match the cost of gasoline.
The two official climate “graduates” still operating are Malta, a spinout that relies on molten salt to store energy for the grid in the form of heat, and Dandelion Energy, which taps into geothermal energy to heat and cool homes. Both, however, remain relatively small and are still striving to gain traction in their respective markets.
After 12 years, X has yet to deliver a breakout success in climate or clean tech. The question is whether shifting strategies at X, and the current crop of climate-related efforts like Tidal, will improve that track record.
Astro Teller, the head of X, told MIT Technology Review that the division “pushed hard on radical innovation” at first. But it has since gradually turned up the “rigor dials” in lots of ways, he says, focusing more on the feasibility of the ideas it pursued.
The earlier X climate efforts were generally high-risk, hardware-heavy projects that directly addressed energy technologies and climate emissions, producing electricity, fuels, and storage in novel ways.
There are some clear differences in the climate projects that X is publicly known to be pursuing now. The two aside from Tidal are Mineral, which is using solar-panel-equipped robots and machine learning to improve agricultural practices, and Tapestry, which is developing ways to simulate, predict, and optimize the management of electricity grids.
With Tidal, Mineral, and Tapestry, X is creating tools to ensure that industries can do more to address environmental dangers and that ecosystems can survive in a hotter, harsher world. It’s also leaning heavily in to its parent company’s areas of strength, drawing on Alphabet’s robotics expertise as well as its ability to derive insights from massive amounts of data using artificial intelligence.
Such efforts might seem less transformative than, say, flying wind turbines—less moonshot, more enabling technology.
But while Teller allows that their new thinking may “be changing the character of the things that you see at X today,” he pushes back against the suggestion that the problems it’s pursuing aren’t as hard, big, or important as in the past.
“I don’t know that Tidal has to apologize for some sort of scope problem,” he says.
“Humanity needs the oceans and is killing off the oceans,” he adds. “We have to find a way to get more value from the ocean for humanity, while simultaneously regenerating the oceans instead of continuing to deplete them. And that’s just not going to happen unless we find a way to get automation into the oceans.”
A better protein source
Tidal, founded in 2018, grew out of informal conversations at X about the mounting threats to the oceans and the lack of knowledge required to address them, Davé says.“The goal was overly simplistic: save the oceans, save the world,” he says. “But it was based on the understanding that the oceans are critical to humanity, but probably the most neglected or misused resource we have.”
They decided to begin by focusing on a single application: aquaculture, which relies on land-based tanks, sheltered bays, or open ocean pens to raise fish, shellfish, seaweed, and more. Today, these practices produce just over half the fish consumed by humans. But the more they’re used, the more they might ease the commercial pressures to overfish, the emissions from fishing fleets, and the environmental impact of trawling.
Tidal believed it could provide tools that would allow aquafarmers to monitor their fish in a more affordable way, spot signs of problems earlier, and optimize their processes to ensure better health and faster growth, at lower cost.
The researchers developed and tested a variety of prototypes for underwater camera systems. They also began training computer vision software, which can identify objects and attributes within footage. To get it started, they used goldfish in a kiddie pool.
For the last five years, they’ve been stress-testing their tools in the harsh conditions of the North Sea, through a partnership with the Norwegian seafood company Mowi.
During a Zoom call, Davé pulled up a black-and-white video of the chaos that ensues at feeding time, when salmon compete to gobble up the food dropped into the pen. It’s impossible for the naked eye to draw much meaning from the scene. But the computer vision software tags each fish with tiny colored boxes as it identifies individuals swimming through the frame, or captures them opening their mouths to feed.
Davé says fish farms can use that data in real time, even in an automated way. For instance, they might stop dropping food into the pen when the fish cease feeding.
The cameras and software can perceive other important information as well, including how much the fish weigh, whether they have reached sexual maturity, and whether they show any signs of health problems. They can detect spinal deformities, bacterial infections, and the presence of parasites known as sea lice, which are often too tiny for the human eye to see.
“We knew from the early days that aquaculture would be us getting our feet wet, so to speak,” says Grace Young, Tidal’s scientific lead. “We knew it would be a stepping stone into working on other hard problems.”
Confident that it’s created one viable commercial application, Tidal is now turning its attention to gathering information about natural ocean ecosystems.
“Now is a big moment for us,” she adds, “because we’re able to see how the tools that we built can apply and make a difference in other ocean industries.”
Restoring our coasts
Seagrasses form thick meadows that can run thousands of miles along shallow coastlines, covering up to about 0.2% of the world’s ocean floors. They provide nutrients and habitat to marine populations, filter pollution, and protect coastlines.The plants are photosynthetic, producing the food they need from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide dissolved in ocean waters. They store carbon in their biomass and deliver it into the seabed sediments. They also help capture and bury the carbon in other organic matter that floats past.
Globally, seagrass beds may sequester as much as 8.5 billion tons of organic carbon in seafloor sediments and, to a much, much smaller degree, in their biomass. On the high end, these meadows draw down and store away about 110 million additional tons each year.
But estimates of the total range and carbon uptake rates of seagrass vary widely. A key reason is that there is no cheap and easy way to map the planet’s extensive coastlines. Only about 60% of seagrass meadows have been surveyed in US waters, with “varying degrees of accuracy because of difficulties in remote sensing of underwater habitat,” according to a National Academies study.
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The seagrass meadows along Waecicu Beach in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia.Whatever their full expanse, though, we know they are shrinking. Development, overfishing, and pollution are all destroying coastal ecosystems, which also include carbon-sucking habitats like mangrove forests and salt marshes. Draining and excavating these shallow biological communities releases hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year. Meanwhile, climate change itself is making ocean waters warmer, more acidic, and deeper, placing greater strains on many of the species.
Nations could help halt or reverse these trends by converting developed shorelines back into natural ones, actively managing and restoring wetlands and seagrass meadows, or planting them in new areas where they may do better as ocean levels rise.
Such work, however, would be wildly expensive. The question is who would pay for it, particularly if it comes at the expense of lucrative coastal development.
The main possibility is that companies or governments could create market incentives to support preservation and restoration by awarding credits for the additional carbon that seagrass, mangroves, and salt marshes take up and store away. Tens of billions of dollars’ worth of carbon credits are likely to be traded in voluntary markets in the coming decades, by some estimates.
The carbon market registry Verra has already developed a methodology for calculating the carbon credits earned through such work. At least one seagrass project has applied to earn credits: a long-running effort by the Nature Conservancy’s Virginia chapter to plant eelgrass around the Virginia Barrier Islands.
But some marine scientists and carbon market experts argue that there need to be more rigorous ways to ensure that these efforts are removing as much carbon as they claim. Otherwise, we risk allowing people or businesses to buy and sell carbon credits without meaningfully helping the climate.
Diving in
Tidal began exploring whether its tools could be used for seagrass late last year, as a growing body of studies underscored the need for carbon removal and highlighted the potential role of ocean-based approaches.“We started to double-click and read a lot of studies,” Davé says. “And found out, ‘Wow, we do have some technology we’ve developed that could be applicable here.’”
The team eventually held a series of conversations with researchers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), an Australian government science agency that has long used drones, satellites, acoustic positioning systems, and other equipment to survey coral reefs, mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows across the Indo-Pacific.
Seagrass is particularly difficult to map on large scales because in satellite images it’s difficult to distinguish from other dark spots in shallow waters, says Andy Steven, a marine scientist who oversees coastal research efforts at CSIRO.
“The world needs to move to being able to map and then measure change on a far more frequent basis,” Steven says. “I see the Tidal technology being part of an arsenal of methods that help us rapidly survey, process, and deliver information to decision makers on the time frames that are needed. It is addressing a really fundamental issue.”
CSIRO agreed to help Tidal test how well its system works. They collaborated on an earlier field trial off the coast of Fiji this summer and on the subsequent experiment this September in Indonesia. The latter country’s thousands of islands boast one of the world’s largest and most diverse expanses of seagrass meadows.
For the first effort, Tidal opted to couple its software with an off-the-shelf autonomous underwater vehicle equipped with a basic camera. The hope was that if the researchers could scan meadows using standard hardware, their general approach would be more widely accessible.
It didn’t work. The seagrass was taller and the tides were lower than expected. The thruster and rudder quickly got clogged up with seaweed, forcing the team to stop every few minutes, Bahman says.
After a brainstorming whiteboard session, the Tidal team decided to take its own camera system, turn it face down, and put it on a float that could be pulled along by a boat. The so-called Hammersled is equipped with fins to keep it moving straight and a set of ropes and cleats that allow the researchers to dip the camera deeper into the water.
Tidal’s researchers test out the “Hammersled” at a pool in the middle of Alphabet’s campus in Sunnyvale, California, by pulling it over patches of plastic seagrass.
The system worked well enough during a few tests in a large pool in the middle of Alphabet’s campus in Sunnyvale, California, where team members pulled it by hand over patches of plastic seagrass on the bottom.
The bigger test, however, is whether Tidal can translate its maps into an accurate estimate of the carbon seagrass holds and buries in the seafloor.
‘We’ve got it’
After Steven and his colleagues arrived in Labuan Bajo, on the western tip of Flores, they rented a 14-cabin liveaboard, the Sea Safari VII, and began sailing around the islands. They launched surveillance drones from the deck to search for promising seagrass beds to study, prioritizing sites with many different species to help train Tidal’s models and algorithms for the wide variability that occurs in the natural world.Once the CSIRO researchers selected, measured, tagged, filmed, and photographed their 100-meter transects, the Tidal team passed through.
They used a little Indonesian fishing boat to pull along the Hammersled. Bahman, software engineer Hector Yee, and other staffers took turns jumping into the water with goggles and flippers to clasp a pontoon and keep the camera pointed straight as they crisscrossed the test area.
Once the process was complete, the CSIRO researchers used spades, peat borers, and other tools to pull up the seagrass and deep sediments from one-meter square study plots.
Back on the main island, the Australian scientists used makeshift ovens, including some created from hair dryers, to dry out the plant materials and sediments. Then they ground them up and deposited them into hundreds of plastic bags, carefully marked to denote different locations and depths.
In the months to come, they’ll analyze the carbon content in each batch at their labs in Adelaide, determining the total amount in each plot.
“If our algorithm takes a look at the data we gathered before they took the core samples and comes up with the same answer, then we’ve got it,” says Terry Smith, a solutions engineer with Tidal.
Open questions
Not everyone, however, is convinced that seagrass is a particularly promising path for carbon removal, or one whose climate benefits we’ll be able to accurately assess.Among the suite of approaches to carbon removal that the National Academies has explored in its studies, those focusing on coastal ecosystems rank near the bottom in terms of the potential to scale them up. That’s largely because these ecosystems can only exist as narrow bands along shorelines, and there’s considerable competition with human activity.
“We need to do everything we can to preserve seagrass,” says Isaac Santos, a professor of marine biogeochemistry at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, because of the valuable roles these plants play in protecting coasts, marine biodiversity, and more.
“But on the big question—Are they going to save us from climate change?—the answer is straightforward: No,” he says. “They don’t have enough area to sequester enough carbon to make a big impact.”
Accurately determining the net carbon and climate impact from seagrass restoration is also problematic, as studies have highlighted.
Carbon sequestration varies dramatically in these coastal meadows, depending on the location, the season, the mix of species, and how much gets gobbled up by fish and other marine creatures. The carbon in seafloor sediments can also leak into the surrounding waters, where some is dissolved and effectively remains in the ocean for millennia, and some may escape back out into the atmosphere. In addition, coastal ecosystems produce methane and nitrous oxide, potent greenhouse gases that would need to be factored into any estimate of overall climate impact.
Finally, the vast, vast majority of the carbon in seagrass beds is buried in the seafloor, not in the plant material that Tidal intends to measure.
“And we also know that the correlation between biomass and sediment carbon is not straight forward,” Santos said in an email. “Hence, any approach based on biomass only will require all sorts of validations,” to ensure that it actually provides reliable estimates of stored carbon.
An essay in The Conversation late last month highlighted another concern: environmental justice. The authors, Sonja Klinsky of Arizona State University and Terre Satterfield of the University of British Columbia, stressed that the local communities most affected by such projects should have considerable say in them. Some coastal towns may not want to turn their active harbor back into, say, a salt marsh.
“Much of the global population lives near the ocean,” they wrote, and some interventions “might impinge on places that support jobs and communities” and provide significant amounts of food.
Unlocking the secrets
Addressing the scientific questions will require better understanding of coastline ecosystems. CSIRO’s Steven says he hopes that Tidal’s technology will provide easier ways to conduct the necessary studies. “It’s absolutely a challenge,” he says. “But you’ve got to start somewhere.”As for the environmental justice concerns, Tidal stresses that these nature-based approaches to carbon removal potentially provide multiple benefits to natural ecosystems and local communities. They could, for instance, help to sustain fishery populations. Tidal is also working with CSIRO to train local communities in Fiji and Indonesia, including university students, to help them participate directly in carbon markets.
“Ultimately, our vision is to provide these communities with tools to be able to manage, protect, and repopulate these local systems locally,” Davé said in an email.
So what’s next for Tidal?
It will still take months for the Australian team to complete its analysis of the seagrass and sediments. Whatever they find, the teams plan to continue conducting field experiments to refine the models and algorithms and make sure they provide accurate carbon estimates across a variety of seagrass types in different regions and conditions.
For instance, Tidal may look to partner with other research groups focused on the Bahamas, another major seagrass region.
If it does ultimately work well, Tidal believes, its suite of tools could also support other ocean-based approaches to carbon removal, including growing more seaweed and restoring mangrove forests.
Davé says he can envision a variety of potential business models, including providing carbon measurement, reporting, and verification as a service to offsets registries or organizations carrying out restoration work. They might also create autonomous robotic systems that plant seagrass with little human involvement.
Even if the systems don’t provide reliable enough carbon estimates, Tidal believes its efforts will still aid scientific efforts to understand crucial ocean ecosystems, and support international efforts to protect them. That could include monitoring the well-being of coral reefs, which are gravely threatened by warming waters, Davé says.
It may not sound like a moonshot in the way that X originally conceived of the concept. It’s certainly no space elevator.
But by building tools that a variety of organizations could use in a variety of ways to unlock the secrets of Earth’s critical and fragile ecosystems, Tidal may be demonstrating a new way to take on really hard problems.
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Read More »Why Scientists Are Bugging the Rainforest
October 18th, 2023
Via Wired, an article on how some scientists are using microphones and AI to automatically detect species by their chirps and croaks. This bioacoustics research could be critical for protecting ecosystems on a warming planet.
THERE’S MUCH, MUCH more to the rainforest than meets the eye. Even a highly trained observer can struggle to pick out individual animals in the tangle of plant life—animals that are often specifically adapted to hide from their enemies. Listen to the music of the forest, though, and you can get a decent idea of the species by their chirps, croaks, and grunts.
This is why scientists are increasingly bugging rainforests with microphones—a burgeoning field known as bioacoustics—and using AI to automatically parse sounds to identify species. Writing today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers describe a proof-of-concept project in the lowland Chocó region of Ecuador that shows the potential power of bioacoustics in conserving forests.
“Biodiversity monitoring has always been an expensive and difficult endeavor,” says entomologist and ecologist David Donoso of Ecuador’s National Polytechnic School, a coauthor of the paper. “The problem only worsens when you consider that good monitoring programs require many years of data to fully understand the dynamics of the system, and how specific problems affect these dynamics.”
The researchers picked over 40 sites across different landscape types, including active agricultural lands, plantations that had been abandoned for decades (and are recovering ecologically), and intact, old-growth forest. Below, you can see the instruments they deployed. At left is a microphone that recorded sound for two minutes every 15 minutes, so it didn’t drain its battery as quickly as recording 24/7. At right is a light trap for catching insects.
Once the team had these recordings, they tapped experts to identify birds and amphibians by their vocalizations, and used DNA from the light traps to identify nocturnal insects. They also used AI to identify the bird species by sound.
“We can say the scientific part is basically solved, so the AI models work,” says conservation ecologist Jörg Müller of the University of Würzburg in Germany, lead author of the paper. “It’s fine-scale, high-quality. And the nice thing is that you can store the data.” Several years of recordings will track how the forest ecosystem evolves over time, with species populations waxing or waning as new arrivals colonize the terrain, or as climate change affects which struggle or thrive in hotter, drier conditions.
In particular, scientists and conservationists are interested in learning about the composition of species that return to disturbed environments. In Ecuador, the agricultural land tends to attract birds from southern parts of South America with their natural open areas, which are similar to the Pampas grasslands. “So it could be that you have the same number of species in agriculture and all those forests, but totally different ones,” says Müller. “These habitats are not empty—they are full of birds—but not the original fauna from primeval forests.”
Researchers are also trying to track animals that are responding to a complex set of overlapping environmental stressors. Forest health used to primarily be a problem of deforestation. Now it is a far more complicated set of problems stemming from global climate change and land use. The Amazon, for instance, is threatened by both loggers and severe droughts.
One of the challenges of field observation is that it requires humans, who are very big mammals, to go traipsing through the forest, altering its normal bustle. But a microphone simply listens, a camera trap quietly watches for movement and snaps a picture, and a light trap silently attracts insects.
The study’s recordings picked up the ??purple-chested hummingbird, shown at top, and the extremely rare banded ground cuckoo, shown below. “This is the holy grail for ornithologists. Some ornithologists go to Ecuador for 30 years to see the bird and never see them,” says Müller. “And we report it with sound recorders and with camera traps. So it shows another advantage from these recorders: They do not disturb.”
Bioacoustics can’t fully replace ecology fieldwork, but can provide reams of data that would be extremely expensive to collect by merely sending scientists to remote areas for long stretches of time. With bioacoustic instruments, researchers must return to collect the data and swap batteries, but otherwise the technology can work uninterrupted for years. “Scaling sampling from 10, 100, [or] 1,000 sound recorders is much easier than training 10, 100, 1,000 people to go to a forest at the same time,” says Donoso.
“The need for this kind of rigorous assessment is enormous. It will never be cost-effective to have a kind of boots-on-the-ground approach,” agrees Eddie Game, the Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist and director of conservation for the Asia Pacific region, who wasn’t involved in the new research. “Even in relatively well-studied places it would be difficult, but certainly, in a tropical forest environment where that diversity of species is so extraordinary, it’s really difficult.”
A limitation, of course, is that while birds, insects, and frogs make a whole lot of noise, many species do not vocalize. A microphone would struggle to pick up the presence of a butterfly or a snake.
But no one’s suggesting that bioacoustics alone can quantify the biodiversity of a forest. As with the current experiment, bioacoustics work will be combined with the use of cameras, field researchers, and DNA collection. While this team harvested DNA directly from insects caught in light traps, others may collect environmental DNA, or eDNA, that animals leave behind in soil, air, and water. In June, for instance, a separate team showed how they used the filters at air quality stations to identify DNA that had been carried by the wind. In the future, ecologists might be able to sample forest soils to get an idea of what animals moved through the area. But while bioacoustics can continuously monitor for species, and eDNA can record clues about which ones crossed certain turf, only an ecologist can observe how those species might be interacting—who’s hunting who, for instance, or what kind of bird might be outcompeting another.
The bioacoustics data from the new study suggests that Ecuador’s forests can recover beautifully after small-scale pastures and cacao plantations are abandoned. For instance, the researchers found the banded ground cuckoo already in 30-year-old recovery forests. “Even our professional collaborators were surprised at how well the recovery forests were colonized by so-called old-growth species,” says Müller. “In comparison to Europe, they do it very quickly. So after, let’s say, 40, 50 years, it’s not fully an old-growth forest. But most of these very rare species can make use of this as a habitat, and thereby expand their population.”
This technology will also be helpful for monitoring forest recovery—to confirm, for example, that governments are actually restoring the areas they say they are. Satellite images can show that new trees have been planted, but they’re not proof of a healthy ecosystem or of biodiversity. “I think any ecologist would tell you that trees don’t make a forest ecosystem,” says Game. The cacophony of birds and insects and frogs—a thriving, complex mix of rainforest species—do.
“I think we’re just going to keep on learning so much more about what sound can tell us about the environment,” says Game, who compares bioacoustics to NASA’s Landsat program, which opened up satellite imagery to the scientific community and led to key research on climate change and wildfire damage. “It was radically transformational in the way we looked at the Earth. Sound has some similar potential to that,” he says.
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