How Tracking Technology Is Transforming Our Understanding of Animal Behavior
January 4th, 2023
Via The Conversation, a look at how tracking technology is transforming our understanding of animal behavior:
Biologging is the practice of attaching devices to animals so that scientific data can be collected. For decades, basic biologgers have been used to relay physiological data including an animal’s heart rate or body temperature. But now, new technologies are affording scientists a more advanced insight into the behaviour of animals as they move through their natural environment undisturbed.
The tracking of individual animals also provides access to remote locations that are difficult to study. In particular, science has only a limited knowledge of marine environments – the surface of the moon has been mapped and studied more extensively than our own ocean floor.
But researchers have recently fitted small video cameras to the dorsal fins of tiger sharks in the Bahamas. The footage led to the discovery of the world’s largest known seagrass ecosystem, and has extended the total known seagrass coverage by more than 40%. Seagrass ecosystems are important carbon stores, home to thousands of marine species, and can provide a buffer against coastal erosion. Conservationists are now better placed to protect these important ecosystems as a result of biologging.
Here are four more examples of humans working with animals – from dragonflies and ospreys to hedgehogs and jaguars – to improve our understanding of wildlife behaviour and numbers around the world, and how best to protect them.
1. Hedgehog protection
Rural hedgehog populations in Britain declined by up to 75% between 1981 and 2020. Conservationists require more information on their movement and behaviour to inform future efforts to protect this endangered species.Between 2016 and 2019, 52 hedgehogs were fitted with GPS trackers programmed to record the location of the hedgehog every five minutes throughout the night. The tracking data indicated that male hedgehogs travelled longer distances than females, and would often move several kilometres to find a mate. Male hedgehogs are therefore more vulnerable to road mortality. Research like this can inform strategies such as building wildlife tunnels that enable hedgehogs to bypass busy roads.
Tracking data has also revealed that rural hedgehogs travel further each night in search of food than urban hedgehogs. This highlights the importance of urban gardens as a hedgehog habitat, and supports the use of hedgehog tunnels to connect gardens.
These studies used GPS trackers that store data on the device, meaning each animal had to be recaptured to retrieve the information. This is fine for animals such as hedgehogs that do not roam far, but it can be a challenge when studying migratory animal species.
2. Osprey migration
Scientists studied birds prior to biologging by fitting them with wing tags so they could be identified individually from a distance. But information about their location relied on researchers repeatedly finding the same bird.Ospreys are migratory birds of prey that feed primarily on fish. They were persecuted into extinction in the UK in the 1800s, before being reintroduced to England in 1996. However, the absence of accurate data regarding ospreys’ movement has made it difficult to identify their wintering grounds and migratory stopover sites.
Two UK conservation charities, the RSPB and the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation, began osprey satellite tracking projects around 2007. Data on an osprey’s location, orientation, altitude and speed has provided researchers with information about their migration routes and wintering grounds.
Such information has aided measures to protect ospreys throughout their migratory range. These include education programmes to inspire young conservationists in the UK and Gambia, countries at opposite ends of an osprey’s migratory pathway.
Biologging has also unveiled peculiarities in the behaviour of ospreys. For example, one bird was found to have hitched a ride on cargo ships during its annual migration.
3. Flying insects
Biologging devices are generally large to account for a battery. So while attaching them to larger animals is relatively straightforward, studying insects has required the development of miniature devices.Insects are among the world’s smallest flying migrants – monarch butterflies and green darner dragonflies migrate south from Canada to the US each year. Researchers fitted small automated radio transmitters (weighing less than 300mg) to these insects.
Their movement over long distances was then monitored through a network of more than 1,500 automated receiver towers spread across the American continent. The towers record the biologgers within a 10km proximity.
The data revealed that the insects travelled distances of up to 143km each day at speeds of over 20 metres per second. This exceeded known daily travelling distances for the darner dragonfly. Warmer temperatures and wind assistance also allowed the insects to migrate at a faster pace.
4. Tracking from space
The Icarus project involves researchers attaching transmitters to a variety of animal species. These transmitters send data to a receiver in space which then transmits the information back to a ground station, from where it is sent to relevant researchers.This reduces the delay for data processing and device relocation, and allows the immediate availability of behavioural and physiological data on a global scale. Since March 2021, the project has tracked the movements of 15 species worldwide, including the Saiga Antelope, fruit bats and Jaguars.
The information can be used to predict the impacts of environmental change. Identifying which habitat types are selected or avoided can reveal the most productive habitats for endangered species. The behavioural response of animals to ecological changes, such as a warmer Arctic, can also be monitored.
Data from the project may allow scientists to use certain animal species to predict disaster events. For example, research has found that some animals exhibited behavioural changes immediately before Japan’s 2011 earthquake.
Icarus researchers also suggest that disease transmission hotspots could be identified using biologgers, which could help to map the spread of viruses.
Biologging has allowed for the protection of various animal species and environments by widening our knowledge of animal behaviour. But remote animal tracking may also allow humanity to be better protected from natural disasters in the future.
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Read More »Geospatial Technology Helps In The Fight Against Environmental Crimes In Brazil
November 23rd, 2022
Via Planet.com, a look at how Geospatial Technology Helps In The Fight Against Environmental Crimes In Brazil at how geospatial technology is helping fight environmental crime in Brazil:
The size and complexity of the Brazilian territory, especially in the Amazon region, has historically plagued institutions, like the country’s Federal Police, with challenges around effective response to environmental crimes and illicit activities. To improve their operations, these agencies needed a remote sensing dataset that would complement their field work, allowing them to take timely action around environmental degradation in the region like illegal mining and deforestation, drug trafficking, and unauthorized fires.
Enter: The Brasil MAIS Program. This project is one of the Ministry of Justice and Public Safety’s (MJSP) strategic initiatives and is the largest remote sensing operational project in Brazil. It grants all public agencies access to RedeMAIS (Brasil MAIS Program Network), an ecosystem for sharing data, information, and unique knowledge of the entire national territory which allows for more precise and effective action. Through this project, agencies are able to gain access to Planet’s daily satellite imagery and change-detection alerts from SCCON.
With the implementation of SCCON Platform alerts powered by Planet data, the Brazilian Federal Police has made great strides in preventing illicit activities in one of the most remote regions of the world. With this data, they have been able to reduce money laundering and corruption, protect and safeguard their community, and support Federal government decision making. Today, we’re pleased to share a few highlights from the program:
With its use of Planet satellite data and SCCON’s automated change detection, the project has collected over $ 1.9 billion / R$ 9.6 billion from fines, seized goods, and the freezing of assets since 2020.
Over 3,300 public agents were mobilized in over 120 joint operations, using satellite imagery and data from the project.
To date, over 270 institutions and 26,000 users have direct access to the data in one platform, including geoservices, dashboards and reports. This cohesion promotes broad participation and support for decision-making within the Federal Government.
Accessible from anywhere in the country, the Brasil MAIS Program is fostering greater collaboration across public agencies looking to enact lasting change in the region. Planet is proud to support this work with our partner in Brazil, SCCON. To read the full report, download our comprehensive case study here.
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Read More »Scientist Uses Drones and Algorithms To Save Whales — And The Rest Of The Ocean
October 28th, 2022
Via The Washington Post, an article on a scientist who uses drones and algorithms to save whales — and the rest of the ocean:
Just yards from the Fish 1, a 22-foot research vessel, a humpback whale about twice the size of the boat hurled itself out of the water, sending shimmering droplets in a broken necklace of splash.
In the other direction, a hulking cargo ship, stacked high with containers, crept closer.
Aboard the Fish 1, a slight figure whose face is crinkled from years in the sun and saltwater, looked from one to the other. Ocean scientist Douglas McCauley wanted to see whether the near real-time detection system he and his colleagues had developed, Whale Safe, could avert collisions between whales and ships in the Santa Barbara Channel.
The tool represents one of the ways McCauley, who heads the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California Santa Barbara, is working to protect the ocean even as it becomes more industrialized. By collecting data from several sources — an acoustic monitoring buoy that listens for whale songs, identifies them according to species with an algorithm and sends that information to satellites; a predictive habitat model for blue whales; and sightings logged in an app — Whale Safe forecasts to ships the chances of meeting a whale. Then, it grades shipping companies on whether they actually slow down to 10 knots or less during whale migrations, from May 1 to Dec. 15.
“We can literally watch all of the ships in California and across the whole ocean; we are better positioned than ever before to try to track damage as it occurs, or before it occurs,” McCauley said a few days later in a Zoom call from the French Polynesian island of Moorea, where he is spending a month researching coral reefs. “We are in trouble if we don’t do something different, and I realized that if I kept sticking my head literally underwater or stayed in the lab, these problems weren’t going to fix themselves.”
Humans have worked in the seas for centuries: fishing, seafaring and more recently, drilling for oil and gas and the development of offshore wind farms. Shipping lanes cross almost every surface of the sea, except for shrinking swaths of the Southern and Arctic Ocean.
But as development has intensified and the planet has warmed, the 43-year-old McCauley has ventured into the gray area between scientific research and advocacy to try to fix these problems — or at least make them visible.
He is trying to save the whales; collect plastic; explore the links between climate change, overfishing and nutrition in the South Pacific; warn about the dangers of seabed mining; track sharks using drones and artificial intelligence; and calculate the benefits to people, animals and the planet that come from protecting broad swaths of the sea.
“One of Doug’s compelling traits as a scientist is that he is keen to explore outside the box,” said Benjamin Halpern, a UCSB professor of marine biology and ocean conservation who has worked with McCauley for about a decade. “He is a very creative thinker, and able to think differently about the solutions to problems and what kinds of research and science can help inform those.”
[These whales are on the brink. Now comes climate change — and wind power]
In meetings with corporate executives and political leaders, McCauley has made a consistent argument: Protecting the sea is in our interest, since it already does a lot of the work for us.
In 2020 McCauley led a report that provided a framework for marine protected areas on the high seas, finding that such refuges could be powerful tools for biodiversity conservation, carbon sequestration and climate resilience. Even port and fishing communities, he argued, depend on an ocean that is still wild and alive.
“We have a globally unique chance to talk about this before it’s too late,” he said.
The encounter in late September, amid one of the world’s busiest shipping channels and a vibrant ecosystem, offered a glimpse of how to do just that. Minutes after the container ship had passed McCauley’s boat, the whale — possibly the same one, but it is hard to tell — had found another, and the two sent up exhales of spray.
It was as if a bulldozer operator had plowed through a herd of elephants without stopping, not too far from a major city’s downtown, hoping to avoid a crash. And it happens many times a day here in the Santa Barbara Channel, even though barely anyone sees it.
While McCauley tracks these interactions, much of the public seems to have noticed this industrial shift underwater.
Since 2000, global container port traffic has nearly quadrupled; aquaculture produces more than half of the fish we eat; about 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the oceans every year; over half the global oceans are fished; more than 700,000 miles of undersea data cables snake across the ocean floor; seabed mining may soon begin in some of the world’s last pristine ecosystems; and the fishing industry is beginning to target deep ocean life.
The ocean is, by far, the world’s largest carbon sink, having absorbed about 40 percent of the excess greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels. But it comes at a cost: more acidic and warmer waters, which may not soak up as much carbon going forward. The fact that ocean animals evolved to a narrow range of conditions, McCauley and others found, makes them more vulnerable to climate change.
The landscape was less crowded when McCauley grew up in Lomita, Calif., and went to school in San Pedro, not far from the ports and the channel. He could see whale migrations out the window of his high school geometry class. From an early age, he would ride his bike to the beach as an escape, and “all of a sudden, I was in a super wild place.”
He spent much of his adolescence and early adulthood working at the local public aquarium, and working on fishing boats.
It was there, catching squid at 1 a.m. to sell as bait, hauling in a croaker bigger than he was, and watching people spend $20 a day to go out a boat to catch dinner for their families, that he saw how a thriving ocean economy works.
It was later, in his career as a scientist, that he had data to explain what he learned through experience: What is good for the ocean is also good for people, and possibly business too. Slowing down ships means fewer ship strikes, which means more whales. That is good for biodiversity and climate change: Whales themselves are carbon sinks and fertilize plant growth (another carbon sink). It also means cleaner air for those who live nearby, and fewer carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
He and others developed WhaleSafe, he said, after shipping companies asked: “These are the biggest mammals on the planet. Can’t you tell us when they’re there so we don’t run into them?”
Three shipping companies contacted for this article, as well as an industry association, said that they supported such programs. CMA CGM, among the world’s largest shipping container companies, is sending alerts above medium directly to their captains, and Hyundai Heavy Industries is working with Whale Safe to incorporate its data directly onboard new ships.
But some of the firms tracked by the tool, which has recently expanded its use to include San Francisco, have received F grades. Matson Navigation, for example, only slowed down roughly 18 percent of the time.
Lee Kindberg, the head of environment and sustainability for Maersk, which received a B for slowing down in about 79 percent of cases, said the company supports Whale Safe. But she added that shippers must balance safety and speed restrictions against weather and demands from companies — and their customers — who want everything faster.
And, as climate change scrambles whales’ migration patterns and schedules, tools like Whale Safe may become even more essential in protecting them, McCauley said.
Trying to prevent ship strikes, one of the leading causes of whale deaths, is becoming an emergency. Three of the past four years rank as the deadliest on record for whales on the West Coast — about 80 annually — but the death toll is probably much higher, since most sink to the ocean floor. There have been no known ship strikes in the Santa Barbara Channel since the launch of Whale Safe in 2020, though it is too early to make a causal link.
A moored acoustic monitoring buoy near the Channel Islands in California. Santa Cruz Island is in the distance.
While aboard the Fish 1, McCauley pulled on a wet suit, flippers and a mask and jumped into the water to inspect the buoy. Looking not unlike one of the sea lions who popped up nearby with his slick outer layer and whiskers poking out beneath his mask, he scrubbed it for barnacles, and made sure all of the hardware was in good condition.Like the buoys, McCauley seems to be able to take in information, translate it into languages its recipients understand and make it actionable, according to Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist who has worked with McCauley and now serves as deputy director for climate and environment at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
“He is adept at boiling something down to the most important components and expressing his knowledge in an accessible fashion, and he is passionate about solutions,” she said in an email.
“Doug does seem quite nimble and effective at engaging with the private sector, and I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing,” Halpern said. “Maybe it’s valuable that someone is testing those waters, because we can’t solve the climate change catastrophe we face without engaging the private sector and corporations.”
McCauley spreads his message with a billionaire’s help. Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne decided to fund an ocean science lab after reading a landmark study he co-authored on the ocean’s industrialization. McCauley serves as the lab’s director, and the university has received $88 million from the Benioffs since 2016.
Since then, their conversations about the ocean and “carbon math” have shaped much of Benioff’s climate and environmental philanthropy, including the “Trillion Trees” tree-planting initiative. “By aligning with Doug on the ocean, we found a bigger vision on the climate,” Benioff said in a Zoom interview.
McCauley said he is aware that some might question engaging with private philanthropists and industry, but argued that he and others could not afford to wait for federal funding — and action. “We don’t have the luxury of time.”
The boat approaches the buoy. McCauley prepares to check and clean the buoy. McCauley steadies himself as he works on the buoy.
Over the past few years, McCauley has tried to make that decision-enabling data available and legible to policymakers across the globe.Alongside a group of other scientists, McCauley has worked in Kiribati to document how damage to coral reefs from climate change and overfishing harms the diet and health of country’s inhabitants, who depend on fish for essential nutrients. The researchers share that data with government officials to show which islands are most at risk.
McCauley is also tackling the issue of deep seabed mining, which could begin in international waters as soon as next year. McCauley and the Benioff Ocean Science Lab have tried to map potential excavation sites across the globe, since the public remains largely unaware of this development, its scope and its possible threats.
[How protecting the ocean can save species and fight climate change]
At the bottom of the ocean around the world lie significant deposits of metals, including some needed for electric vehicle batteries and other clean energy projects. Some companies see ocean deposits as key to this clean energy transition, and are jockeying for primacy in this prospective new industry.
Along with more than 400 other scientists, McCauley signed a statement last year arguing that deep-sea mining will result in “loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning that would be irreversible on multigenerational time scales.” They argued that there are still too many unknowns in the deep ocean to mine them responsibly.
McCauley helped bring together leaders from environmental nonprofits and businesses to discuss the risks of seabed mining. Afterward, other advocates successfully worked to pressure Google, BMW, Volvo, Samsung and others to support a moratorium.
But industry officials such as the Metals Company CEO Gerard Barron counter that deep-sea mining opponents are ignoring the trade-offs that come from keeping the ocean off limits.
“While saying ‘No’ to something is easy,” said Barron, who heads a seabed mining corporation, “finding a solution is hard and if we fail to consider all our options, we will consign our biodiverse rainforests and carbon sinks to further destruction, increase our emissions load, and further damage the oceans Douglas has set out to protect.”
McCauley, by contrast, sees these planetary puzzle pieces as interlocked. Stopping seabed mining might mean less ocean noise, which might mean more whales, which means more stored carbon, which might mean fewer forest fires in his native California, or less sea-level rise in Kiribati.
Sometimes it is impossible for McCauley to ignore how climate change has changed his surroundings. He recently took a group of students to the woods near Santa Barbara to learn about the carbon cycle, but had difficulty teaching the lesson because almost all of the trees around them had died of drought, beetle infestation, or forest fire.
“I have too real a sense of how bad things are going to get with climate in such a short amount of time,” he said.
Still, he manages to marvel at the natural world, and the mysteries it holds.
Back aboard the Fish 1, not long after the container ship — and an oil tanker — had passed by, one of the whales came right underneath the boat. It surfaced briefly about 10 feet away, flicking its tail and disappearing.
Later, over Zoom, McCauley reflected on that moment: “I have no good explanation for why a whale would swim under the boat and look up at us, other than that it can.
“Some piece of that is a reminder that they deserve a space on the planet because they are incredibly intelligent, incredibly complex and sophisticated animals, and wonder about us as much as we wonder about them.”
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Read More »Saving Whales From Ship Collisions With Technology
September 24th, 2022
Via New York Times, a look at how scientists hope to use technology to help save whales from ship collisions:
Fran washed ashore in August, some 25 miles south of the Golden Gate Bridge. The beloved and much-photographed female humpback whale had a broken neck, most likely the result of being hit by a ship.
This latest instance of oceanic roadkill increased the tally of whales killed by ships near San Francisco this year to four. The true death toll is likely to be much higher as whale carcasses often sink to the sea floor.
Scientists and conservationists are trying to drive that number to zero. On Wednesday, Whale Safe, an A.I.-powered detection system, began operating around San Francisco Bay. Its goal is to warn large ships in the area’s waters when whales are nearby.
About 25 miles out to sea from the Golden Gate on Monday afternoon, a yellow buoy bobbed not far from the great white shark hunting grounds of the Farallon Islands. On a boat close by called the Nova, Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative at the University of California, Santa Barbara, donned a wet suit and snorkel and jumped into the brine to give the buoy some T.L.C. before its big day. The buoy, tethered to an underwater microphone, is an integral part of Whale Safe.
Researchers estimate more than 80 endangered blue, humpback and fin whales are killed by ships each year along the West Coast. With increasing global marine traffic, the problems created by thousands of massive ships crisscrossing waters that teem with ocean giants are expected to only worsen. Near San Francisco in particular, climate change has been shifting the whales’ food closer to shore, placing the whales in harm’s way more often, according to Kathi George, field operations manager for the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, Calif.
That’s why Dr. McCauley and a network of collaborators developed Whale Safe with funding from Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce, and his wife, Lynne. Whale Safe, which has been operating in the Santa Barbara Channel since 2020, provides near-real-time data on the presence of whales and sends out alerts to mariners, shipping companies and anyone else who signs up. The hope is that if ship captains get an alert saying there are lots of whales in the area, they might be more likely to shift course or slow their approach to port — a tactic that research suggests makes deadly collisions less likely.
“The near-real-time aspect of Whale Safe’s alerts and being able to have an idea of where whales are 24 hours a day is really unique and gives us a lot more information to share with ships coming in and out of the Bay,” said Maria Brown, superintendent of the Cordell Bank and Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuaries for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Expanding Whale Safe from the Southern California shipping lanes to San Francisco will cover the two busiest hubs in California and two epicenters of whale mortality from ship strikes.
In 2021, the first full year of Whale Safe’s operation in the Santa Barbara Channel, there were no recorded whale-ship interactions in the area, which Dr. McCauley called an encouraging sign.
Whale Safe also uses publicly available location data transmitted by ships to determine whether they slow down to 10 knots during trips through the whales’ feeding grounds, something NOAA has been asking large ships to do during whale season (usually May to November off California) since 2014. Whale Safe processes the information on vessel speed and assigns shipping companies a letter grade.
Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, earned a “B” for slowing down 79 percent of the time in the Santa Barbara Channel. But ships operated by Matson, a major player in Pacific shipping, slowed only 16 percent of the time and received an “F.”
A spokesperson for Matson said the company had long instructed its ships to participate in NOAA’s voluntary speed reduction programs “to the greatest extent possible, given our operational requirements. A large percentage of our vessels have been averaging less than 12 knots.”
On Monday afternoon at the buoy, Dr. McCauley used a kitchen scrubber and a plastic putty knife to scrape away algae and checked that various instruments were intact. The device’s underwater microphone was positioned some 280 feet beneath his flippers, listening for whales from the sea bottom and attached to its floating counterpart’s communications array with a beefy rubber-clad cable. This high-tech buoy was developed by Mark Baumgartner of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and his team is using the same technology to listen for critically endangered North Atlantic Right whales along the East Coast.
Whale Safe uses three data streams: the buoy listens for and identifies the songs of blue, fin and humpback whales with an algorithm and beams its findings to a satellite; a mathematical model informed by present and past oceanographic and biological data predicts where blue whales are most likely to be; and citizen scientists and trained observers report whale sightings via an app called Whale Alert.
Whale Safe’s platform integrates these data sources and alerts ships to their likelihood of encountering whales that day.
In 2019, before the system’s Santa Barbara launch, 46 percent of vessels slowed down in the Southern California voluntary speed reduction zones, and now the percentage has risen to 60 percent in 2022. But those increases can also be credited to a financial incentive program called Protecting Blue Whales and Blue Skies that pays shipping companies that slow down for whales, as well as more than a decade of outreach from NOAA officials like Ms. Brown to shipping companies.
In the San Francisco area, cooperation rates with NOAA’s speed limits have been hovering around 62 percent for the last three years, and the hope is that Whale Safe can help get them higher.
“We are looking to industry to rise to the occasion voluntarily,” Ms. Brown said. “If they can’t do that, our council has asked us to consider making these speed limits mandatory like they are on the East Coast where they have 80 percent compliance.”
The response from shipping companies has been encouraging, Dr. McCauley said, with some of the world’s largest outfits asking for more information about the good or bad grade they received and on how to get Whale Safe’s alerts to their fleets most efficiently.
CMA CGM, the world’s third largest container shipping company, has created an automated pipeline to disseminate Whale Safe’s alerts straight to ship captains near the Santa Barbara Channel.
Whale Safe’s team is also working with Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world’s largest shipbuilder, to bring the system’s data directly into the navigation systems of newly built ships, said Callie Steffen, a scientist at the Benioff Ocean Initiative and Whale Safe’s project leader.
Now that the system is switched on in two locations, Dr. McCauley said the immediate goal was to continue outreach with companies and try to reduce whale fatalities from ship strikes to zero in the places where Whale Safe is operating. Ms. Steffen and others aim to expand Whale Safe’s ship-speed monitoring to all areas of designated whale concern in the United States and Canada on both coasts.
On Monday, fog erased the horizon as the Nova motored away from the buoy. When the fog broke, the sea ahead of the boat erupted with whale spouts and leaping sea lions. The boat cut its engines, and Dr. McCauley whipped out a camera with a long lens to try to identify some of the nine humpbacks researchers spotted.
The air took on the fishy, primordial odor of whale breath as everyone on board marveled at the wildness on display. Then the radio crackled: Vessel Traffic Services, which manages ship movement in and out of the Bay, said the Nova needed to exit the shipping lane because a large vessel was coming through. The scientists radioed back that the big ship needed to be warned it was headed into an area where whales had been sighted.
While the Nova headed back to San Francisco, Dr. McCauley said that as he was framing up the feeding humpback whales for his photographs, he couldn’t help but think of the recently deceased Fran.
“That should have been her,” he said, with a slight catch in his voice.
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Read More »These New Technologies Could Transform Wildlife Conservation
March 22nd, 2022
Via The Hill, a look at how artificial intelligence, environmental DNA and networked sensors are among the technologies with the highest potential to improve wildlife conservation:
Published last December by conservation technology network WILDLABS, together with a group of non-profit and academic partners, the report is the first of its kind to provide a holistic assessment of the state of conservation technology.
The researchers surveyed 248 conservationists, technologists and academics across 37 countries over the 11 most commonly used conservation technologies, including camera traps, biologgers, acoustic monitoring and remote sensings.
Although it’s estimated that about 8.7 million species populate our planet, 86 percent of all species on land and 91 percent in the oceans are yet to be discovered. Multiple scientific studies suggest that if no action is taken, as many as half of all species could go extinct by the end of the century.
Traditional methods for tracking biodiversity, such as camera traps, which connect digital cameras to an infrared sensor to capture images and videos of animals moving past the sensor, or aerial surveys can be labor-intensive and costly. The technologies highlighted by the research could help reduce the time and resources required to detect wildlife, while increasing the effectiveness of conservation efforts.
Combining AI and citizen science to improve wildlife identification
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used to analyze large amounts of conservation data, such as camera trap, satellite and drone images or audio and video recordings, and improve wildlife identification and monitoring. The non-profit Wild Me created a cloud-based platform Wildbook, which uses computer vision and deep learning algorithms to scan millions of crowdsourced wildlife images to identify species and individual animals based on their unique patterns, including stripes, spots or other defining physical features such as scars.
Photos are added to the cloud by scientists and other volunteers, or are sourced from social media, and over time, the information about each species will grow as more citizen scientists and researchers contribute to the image catalogue. The aggregated data helps inform conservation actions, while the public can follow their favorite animals in the cloud.
Wildbook was started off to improve the tracking of whale sharks which was previously done by attaching plastic tags to the animals that had often never resurfaced. The platform has since grown into a vast database of various different species, including sea turtles, manta rays, sharks, whales, dolphins, big cats, giraffes and zebras.
In partnership with Microsoft’s AI for Earth initiative, Wildbook is hosted on its cloud computing service, Azure and is made available as an open-source software to encourage others to adopt this non-invasive method of species tracking.
A facial recognition tool for wildlife
The BearID Project is developing a facial recognition software that can be applied to camera trap imagery to identify and monitor brown bears, and inform subsequent conservation measures. This is especially important because camera traps are currently unable to consistently recognize individual bears due to the lack of unique natural markings for certain species.
So far, the team of biologists and software engineers have developed an AI system using personal photographs of brown bears from British Columbia, Canada and Katmai National Park, Alaska, which was able to recognize 132 individual bears with an 84 percent accuracy. While the camera trap system is currently under development, the project is already working with indigenous nations in Canada to implement the new tool within bear research and monitoring programs. The ultimate goal is to expand the scope of the facial recognition software to eventually apply to other threatened species.
Using AI to combat wildlife trafficking
AI can also help boost anti-poaching efforts. The software Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS) takes in past poaching records and the geographic data of the protected area to predict poachers’ future behavior, and design poaching risk maps and optimal patrol routes for rangers.
During the first month of its field tests in the Srepok Wildlife Sanctuary in Cambodia, the area identified as most suitable for the reintroduction of tigers in Southeast Asia, PAWS has helped rangers double the amount of snares detected and removed during their patrols.
PAWS has since been integrated with the open-source Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART), which is already used by rangers in over 1,000 protected areas to log data collected during patrols. The integrated tool is currently available to national parks as a beta feature, and has been tested across Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya, Malaysia, Mozambique and Zambia to generate poaching risk maps to assist with patrols.
Plans for the future include connecting the software to remote sensing tools such as satellites or drones to reduce the need for humans to enter the data, and expanding the scope of PAWS to predict other forms of environmental crime, including illegal logging or fishing.
Sampling environmental DNA for biodiversity monitoring
Environmental DNA (eDNA), meanwhile, enables conservationists to collect biodiversity data by extracting DNA from environmental samples, such as water, soil, snow or even air. All living organisms leave traces of their DNA in their environments through their feces, skin or hair, amongst others.
A single sample might carry the genetic code of tens or even hundreds of species, and can provide a detailed snapshot of an entire ecosystem. A recent study has revealed that eDNA could offer a more efficient and cost-effective method for the large-scale monitoring of terrestrial biodiversity. In the study, eDNA sampling detected 25 percent more terrestrial mammal species compared to camera traps, and for half of the cost.
eDNA can also help examine the impact of climate change, detect invisible threats such as viruses or bacteria, and assess the overall health of an ecosystem, which can be used to make the case for greater protection for the area.
NatureMetrics, for instance, partnered with the Lebanon Reforestation Initiative to use eDNA to assess the biodiversity of freshwater ecosystems, providing crucial data from a previously understudied region to inform rehabilitation and restoration work.
Increasing connectivity for better conservation outcomes
By enabling camera traps, tracking devices and other conservation hardware to connect online, networked sensors can offer a more comprehensive picture of animal behavior and provide instant alerts about imminent threats, aiding monitoring and patrolling efforts.
FieldKit and the Arribada Initiative aim to make the technology more accessible by developing low-cost, open-source sensor systems, while Smart Parks and Sensing Clues focus on using networked sensors to optimize protected area monitoring and management.
Most national parks don’t have basic internet or cellphone coverage as national telecommunications networks don’t typically extend to these protected areas. To provide low-power, long-range connectivity, Smart Parks deploys a range of sensors, including gate sensors, alarm systems, and animal, vehicle and people trackers, which run autonomously on solar power, consume little energy and are connected to a secure private network situated in the park itself.
The networked sensors track a wide range of information, and are able to detect human intrusions which can support anti-poaching efforts, or animal breakouts from the protected area into the community which could help preempt human-wildlife conflict.
The data is made available in or near real time in a web application, and can help inform operational decisions related to park management, wildlife conservation and local community protection, and could even be applied to ensure ranger and tourist safety.
Smart Parks technology has been deployed in protected areas around the world, and has helped contribute to the conservation of many endangered species, including orangutans, rhinos and elephants.
Gaming wildlife protection
Although it was not covered by the WILDLABS survey, games can also serve as a valuable tool to activate audiences with critical conservation issues, especially among a younger and more tech-savvy generation. Internet of Elephants, for example, develops a range of gaming and digital experiences based on scientific data to engage people who might not have otherwise held an interest in wildlife conservation.
Its products include Wildeverse, an augmented reality mobile game where players go on conservation missions in the jungle and learn how to keep apes safe, or Unseen Empire, which has turned one of the largest camera trap studies into a gaming experience. Players review real-life camera trap imagery to identify various wildlife species, and in the process learn more about the devastating impact of deforestation, poaching and other human developments on endangered wildlife, including the elusive clouded leopards.
Reducing inequalities in conservation tech
Besides highlighting the most promising tech innovations, the WILDLABS report has also identified some of the key challenges facing the conservation technology ecosystem, including competition for limited funding, duplication of efforts and insufficient capacity-building.
Importantly, the research revealed that financial and technical barriers might disproportionately affect women and people in developing countries.
“Many of the most critical conservation hotspots are also areas that are currently receiving the least support in terms of local tech capacity building,” shared Talia Speaker, WILDLABS Research Lead at WWF and co-author of the report.
Speaker warned about the problematic nature of “parachute science” which involves scientists and conservationists from high-income countries providing temporary support in developing nations and leaving after the project is finished, with no investment in local capacity-building. Without empowering local communities to use and develop conservation technologies themselves, the effectiveness and long-term sustainability of these solutions are put at risk.
To address these challenges, “the findings of this research are already feeding into a variety of WILDLABS programs,” added Speaker. “These range from fellowships that bridge the technology and conservation sectors to targeted community and capacity-building in regions like East Africa and Southeast Asia with high potential for conservation tech impact but historically limited resources for engagement with the field.”
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Read More »Satellite Alerts Help Fight Deforestation In Africa
January 5th, 2021
Via Thomson Reuters Foundation, an article on how satellite alerts are helping fight deforestation in Africa:
A system using satellite data to send free alerts when trees are destroyed has been linked to a significant drop in forest losses in Africa, researchers and academics said on Monday.
Deforestation dropped by an average of 18% across nine central African countries after the alerts were introduced, found a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
“This is really a small revolution,” said study lead Fanny Moffette, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Now that we know subscribers of alerts can have an effect on deforestation, there’s potential ways in which our work can improve the training they receive and support their efforts,” she added in a statement.
Trees absorb about a third of greenhouse gas emissions produced worldwide, but tropical rainforests disappeared at a rate of one football pitch every six seconds in 2019, according to data published by Global Forest Watch.
The study looked at whether the alert system – launched by the Global Forest Watch monitoring project in 2016 – was affecting tree losses in 22 tropical countries in South America, Africa and Asia.
It draws on satellite images updated every eight days, and uses artificial intelligence to identify where trees are vanishing by comparing pictures. It then warns subscribers covering the area so they can investigate and take action.
Organisations signed up to the alerts include governments, wildlife officials and park authorities, as well as NGOs and local forest protectors.
They have used the data to stage extra patrols in areas shown as losing trees and to catch illegal loggers in the act, said Katherine Shea at Global Forest Watch.
Overall the risk of deforestation was 18% lower in 2016-2018 than in earlier years in the nine African countries, which included Cameroon, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
However, deforestation did not decrease overall in South American or Asian countries covered by the alerts.
The authors said similar technology already available in those areas may have lessened the impact.
They estimated the alert system is likely to have stopped between $149 million and $696 million worth of damage and economic consequences from climate change.
“These new systems are making it really easy for people to have a look and see what is going on – and then take action,” said Simon Lewis, Professor of Global Change Science at University College London, who was not involved in the study.
“Having a free alert system to give people near real-time information is incredibly helpful.”
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