USVs Could Deter IUU Fishing
August 29th, 2023
Via the US Naval Institute, a report on how unmanned saildrones deployed primarily for maritime security at present, can support conservation efforts:
In the opening scenes of Top Gun: Maverick, Admiral Chester Cain tells Maverick, “These planes you’ve been testing, Captain, one day, sooner than later, they won’t need pilots at all . . . the future is coming, and you’re not in it.” The Coast Guard faces a similar reckoning. Autonomous technology is an attractive solution to many maritime security challenges. Autonomous oceangoing vessels, for example, could be a critical force multiplier in combating illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. As the Coast Guard continues to increase its support of a free and open Indo-Pacific, it must expedite the deployment of autonomous technology to build its capacity to monitor, detect, and deter IUU fishing.
USVs as Deterrence
The presence of Coast Guard assets deters illegal fishing to some extent. This likely would be the case whether the asset were a cutter or an autonomous USV patrolling the high seas. If bad actors know a Coast Guard asset is in the area, they are more likely to check their practices and location before setting fishing lines.When a Coast Guard vessel is unavailable or unable to operate in a region for an extended period, autonomous USVs could be used to observe, detect, and deter IUU. In addition, the data collected by the USVs could support global transparency efforts and supply allies with critical information within the maritime domain. Following President Joe Biden’s recent announcement expanding the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, USVs could be used to provide presence in waters that are far from any support or persistent presence from a Coast Guard asset.
Commercially Available
USVs already have proved to be a viable tool for maritime domain awareness. The Coast Guard conducted a 30-day proof-of-concept in 2020, testing three different autonomous uncrewed surface vehicles. Yet, three years later, these “low-cost maritime domain awareness” solutions have yet to see active use by the Coast Guard. As the pilot study report noted, USVs could be a useful in identifying fishing vessel activity and supporting search and rescue. Further, reports from USVs could allow the Coast Guard to adaptively deploy cutter assets to areas of concentrated fishing effort.USVs are already supporting maritime domain awareness in other regions. The Saildrone has undertaken both maritime security and scientific missions. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tasked three Saildrones to sail more than 6,000 nautical miles collecting fisheries data, which in turn supported the Alaska Pollock Stock Assessment. In another 2021 partnership with NOAA, five Saildrones sailed into the eye of a hurricane. The U.S. Fifth Fleet has deployed Saildrones across the Arabian Gulf and has a goal of deploying 100 more by the end of summer 2023. In addition, the Fourth Fleet is preparing to deploy USVs to counter transnational criminal organizations and Chinese IUU fishing in both the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans off Central and South America.
NOAA and the Navy have integrated and successfully deployed Saildrone at scale, further demonstrating the applicability and utility of the technology. A USV program could be implemented immediately using the infrastructure and standard operating procedures established by Fifth Fleet. As Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Linda Fagan stated, “Tomorrow looks different. So will we. We will be a more adaptive and connected Coast Guard that generates sustained readiness, resilience, and capability—in new ways—to enhance our Nation’s maritime safety, security, and prosperity.” The Coast Guard must be innovative and able to adapt to the changing maritime landscape. Building capacity by deploying advanced technology in a public-private partnership would greatly advance the service, inspire its workforce, and change the game in maritime security.
Lack of Resources
The growing demand for assets in the Indo-Pacific has exacerbated the Coast Guard’s workforce shortage. The Indo-Pacific region covers more than 65 percent of the global maritime waters and 56 percent of the global ocean capture fisheries. With thousands of fishing and shipping vessels roaming the high seas, the Coast Guard requires additional support and ways to increase its presence. With current resource allocations, the service has little chance of covering this area of responsibility effectively to protect biodiversity and curb illegal fishing.Autonomous USVs could help fill the void. Autonomous seagoing USVs require less manning, less support, and can provide the necessary presence to deter illicit activity, offering a solution to the current and future manpower challenge.
The Human Element
While autonomous USVs are useful, they cannot replace a human in every situation. Manned ships and crews still will be needed to represent the United States, the Coast Guard, and democracy. A USV cannot provide the same relationship. However, this should not be seen as a shortfall, but rather a capability that must be strengthened. A USV can augment the mission and serve as a force multiplier. Imagine instead of sending one fast response cutter (FRC) 2,000 miles by itself, the Coast Guard sent an FRC and four Saildrones, which were able to expand and increase the coverage and presence in the region.The Gray Area of Regulatory Framework
Another challenge is the recognition of and regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles on the high seas. Consider the seizures of USVs by Iran in 2022 in the Red Sea and China in 2016 in the South China Sea. Following the 2016 incident, the Pentagon responded: “It is ours. It is clearly marked; we’d like to have it back and [would] like this to never happen again.” But the legal framework is not clear on what authorities a USV is granted.Questions for the future include how to treat these situations and what policy framework is needed. If a Chinese distant-water fishing vessel in the Indo-Pacific rams and sinks a Coast Guard USV, what legal repercussions should be pursued? The contingencies and legal response will need to be clear, concise, and well thought out, but this should not deter the Coast Guard from moving forward. Questions of USV management are already being addressed in the private and public sector on land, and these policies will help inform policies for the maritime environment. However, challenges will remain inside national jurisdictions and on the high seas. A similar challenge will play out in space in the coming years in terms of jurisdiction, responsibility, and legal authorities.
Looking Forward
There is no foreseeable future in which the Coast Guard would be better off without autonomous vehicles to support its Indo-Pacific strategy. As Admiral Thomas H. Collins stated in his 2004 essay, “Change and Continuity—The U.S. Coast Guard Today”: “Adapting to change is one of the most difficult tasks we face as individuals or as an organization, but with change comes new opportunities. We must inspire a culture of innovation . . . in all mission areas so as to enhance productivity and reduce workload—all the while driving towards quality outcomes.” Adopting this technology is not a question of when, but how fast.While USVs are not a panacea for all maritime security problems, they could increase the Coast Guard’s presence and deter illegal fishing. Getting eyes on the water could bring new opportunities for the service to better respond to the changing threats within the Indo-Pacific area of responsibility.
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Read More »How Africa’s Largest IoT Conservation Network Supports Wildlife Protection
June 28th, 2023
Via Fast Company, a look at how an IoT conservation network supports wildlife protection in Kenya by leveraging cloud-based sensors and networks to collect, monitor, and analyze environmental data in real time:
Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) and Connected Conservation Foundation are protecting the most vulnerable animals and natural resources in Kenya with Africa’s largest landscape-wide Internet of Things conservation network.
The project aims to enhance wildlife and natural resource conservation by leveraging cloud-based sensors and networks to collect, monitor, and analyze environmental data in real time.
This massive undertaking will contribute critical digital infrastructure to help Kenyan partners measure and achieve the global biodiversity targets set out at COP 15, the 2022 UN biodiversity conference, to conserve and manage at least 30% of the world’s natural habitats by 2030.
The data combined with analytics and conservation tools are geared toward effectively protecting and managing wildlife, ensuring peace, and improving the livelihood of the people of northern Kenya, says Samuel Lekimaroro, wildlife protection manager at Northern Rangelands Trust, a Kenyan conservation organization that works to protect and restore the Northern Rangelands of Kenya.
NRT’S IOT CONSERVATION NETWORK: THE FIRST IN KENYA
The NRT’s Internet of Things (IoT) conservation network, the first of its kind in Kenya, is made possible by the Connected Conservation Foundation, which has brought together a coalition of private- and public-sector partners including Cisco, Actility, 51 Degrees, and EarthRanger.The IoT network and high-bandwidth communication backbone currently covers about 7.4 million acres of wilderness in Kenya—a figure that includes 22 of NRT’s community-led conservancies and 4 private reserves with plans to bring more on board to include more of the region, says Sophie Maxwell, executive director of the Connected Conservation Foundation. More than 190 new sensors have been deployed to all parks, with more scheduled in the next few weeks, bringing the total to 250.
For this project, the LoRaWAN network management is done using Actility’s ThingPark platform. While Actility is on the network side, Cisco builds the LoRaWAN gateways or base stations and Actility manages the base stations and the end devices to collect the data and provide the data to application servers.
“What we provide is the core network that connects the base station and the end devices,” says Alper Yegin, chief technology officer at Actility, a provider of low-power networks that play a vital role in IoT infrastructure. “Then on the technical side, there are also sensors coming from various device makers as well as NRT and Connected Conservation.”
NRT and Connected Conservation manage the parks and identify what the use cases are and then they bring all the technologies together. As such, NRT and the Connected Conservation Foundation are the users of this deployment and Cisco is the technology provider, according to Yegin. “We’re providing an innovative solution to manage gateways, integrate sensors, and monitor network operations in real time,” he says.
REVOLUTIONIZING CONSERVATION PROGRAMS
The capabilities of this IoT technology are revolutionizing the way conservation programs operate, offering long-lasting, cost-effective, and secure sensors to combat poaching and protect endangered species, Yegin says.The LoRaWAN IoT sensors are perfect for deploying in the wildlife parks, tracking animals, tracking equipment and vehicles, tracking weather conditions as well as for monitoring the working conditions of machinery, Yegin says. And since the sensors have very low power consumption, once they’re placed on the animals, they can last for nearly 10 years, sometimes more, he says.
“The other special thing with this technology is that it uses unlicensed band, meaning one does not have to acquire a very expensive and limited license from the government,” Yegin says. “So it’s pretty much like Wi-Fi today—anyone can put up Wi-Fi and the same is true for LoRaWAN. As such, this also drives the cost down, which is essential in such wide-area deployments.”
Wildlife protection is a perfect use case for LPWAN IoT, given the vast territories to monitor, the necessity for long-lasting, low-cost sensors, and the requirement for secure technology to combat poaching, he says.
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The various sensors, which include rhino, lion, cheetah, and leopard trackers, livestock trackers, and ranger and vehicle trackers, provide critical data that is then visualized in EarthRanger for analysis and insights so that NRT can take any necessary conservation actions. EarthRanger is a tool that collects, integrates, and displays all historical and real-time data available from a protected area to enable organizations to make better decisions about how to manage those areas.For example, data from the ranger, vehicle, and wildlife sensors enable rangers to monitor and respond to rhino threats to prevent poaching, share information on sick or vulnerable animals, boost conservation management strategies, and redeploy security measures between conservancies.
INCREASE IN ENDANGERED BLACK RHINO POPULATION
Black rhinos are still critically endangered animals because of the demand for rhino horns on the international black market. Kenya, however, is one of the few places in the world where black rhino populations are increasing due to the success of these conservation efforts, Maxwell says.Consequently, it’s crucial to establish safe and connected rangelands for these endangered species to roam, according to Maxwell.
Having the tags on the rhinos enables the NRT to remove the fences and create larger connected habitats for the rhinos to roam, she says. And it has helped boost the black rhino numbers in Kenya by 10%.
“The technology is what we call a reserve-area network solution—and that is connectivity, communications, and sensors that bring real-time data back into an operations room,” she says. “That data is then visualized on the map through a range of software and that enables people to track the movement of people, the movement of wildlife, and the movement of the ranger teams. And that all happens in real time.”
The battery-powered LoRaWAN-enabled sensors communicate via a long-range, ultra-low data rate connection, resulting in longer battery life. Additionally, LoRa sensors are a fraction of the cost of satellite tracking tags—transforming how conservation programs operate because being able to deploy many sensors means capturing more data, enabling NRT to demonstrate the effectiveness of its conservation efforts, which is really valuable, according to Maxwell.
“Previously, NRT and our member conservancies used an analog system, and we were unable to observe what was happening in the landscape in terms of wildlife trends, asset monitoring, and security patrol coordination,” Lekimaroro says. “We were only communicating via radio between the conservancies and the Joint Operations and Communications Center (JOCC).”
Through Connected Conservation, NRT is now able to successfully protect and monitor wildlife, coordinate field patrols, and support the government and communities in peace efforts from an informed point of knowledge/data assessed by EarthRanger, according to Lekimaroro.
“All field patrol teams can be monitored and supported by the team in headquarters, which is the central location, from the JOCC,” he says. “Through technology, intra- and inter-conservancy communications have improved, allowing for more efficient surveillance, wildlife protection, and monitoring operations.”
The increased data transmission into the centralized JOCC system has helped the NRT assess patrol efforts, wildlife trends, patterns, and data generation for management decision making, Lekimaroro says.
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Read More »AI-Powered Marine Mammal Spotting App
February 8th, 2023
An innovative new app, Seaspotter capitalizes both on AI and citizen scientists to support marine research by allowing anyone to simply take a picture of any marine mammals they encounter. SeaSpotter will then notify you of which animal was spotted, and log the findings to our open-source database ready for scientific research. ,
Read More »SealNet: Facial Recognition Can Help Conserve Seals
November 26th, 2022
Via AP News, a report on how facial recognition technology – which is mostly associated with uses such as surveillance and the authentication of human faces – can help save seals.
A research team at Colgate University has developed SealNet, a database of seal faces created by taking pictures of dozens of harbor seals in Maine’s Casco Bay. The team found the tool’s accuracy in identifying the marine mammals is close to 100%, which is no small accomplishment in an ecosystem home to thousands of seals.
The researchers are working on expanding their database to make it available to other scientists, said Krista Ingram, a biology professor at Colgate and a team member. Broadening the database to include rare species such as the Mediterranean monk seal and Hawaiian monk seal could help inform conservation efforts to save those species, she said.
Cataloguing seal faces and using machine learning to identify them can also help scientists get a better idea of where in the ocean seals are located, Ingram said.
“Understanding their dispersal, understanding their patterns really helps inform any conservation efforts for the coast,” she said. “For mobile marine mammals that move around a lot and are hard to photograph in the water, we need to be able to identify individuals.”
SealNet is designed to automatically detect the face in a picture, crop it and recognize it based on facial patterns such as eyes and nose shape, as it would a human. A similar tool called PrimNet that is for use on primates had been used on seals previously, but SealNet outperformed it, the Colgate researchers said.
The Colgate team published its findings in April in the scientific journal Ecology and Evolution. They processed more than 1,700 images of more than 400 individual seals, the paper said.
The paper stated that the “ease and wealth of image data that can be processed using SealNet software contributes a vital tool for ecological and behavioral studies of marine mammals in the developing field of conservation technology.”
Harbor seals are a conservation success story in the U.S. The animals were once subject to bounties in New England, where they were widely viewed by fishermen as pests in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which turned 50 in October, extended them new protections — and populations began to rebound.
Seals and other marine mammals have long been studied using satellite trackers. Using artificial intelligence to study them is a way to bring conservation into the 21st century, said Jason Holmberg, executive director of Wild Me, an Oregon-based company that works to bring machine learning to biologists. Wild Me is developing a potential partnership with SealNet.
“This is a shift and a lift of ‘big brother’ style technology to a very benevolent conservation-style goal,” Holmberg said.
Harbor seals are now fairly abundant in New England waters, where they haul out on rocks and delight seal watch cruises and beachgoers. Other seal species, however, remain in jeopardy. The Mediterranean monk seal is thought to be the world’s most endangered seal with only a few hundred animals remaining.
The use of facial recognition could provide more valuable data, said Michelle Berger, an associate scientist at the Shaw Institute in Maine, who was not involved in the SealNet research.
“Once the system is perfected I can picture lots of interesting ecological applications for it,” Berger said. “If they could recognize seals, and recognize them from year to year, that would give us lots of information about movement, how much they move from site to site.”
The Colgate researchers are also working with FruitPunch, a Dutch artificial intelligence company, to improve some aspects of SealNet to encourage wider use. FruitPunch is getting a few dozen scientists around the world to work on a challenge to streamline SealNet’s workflow, said Tjomme Dooper, FruitPunch’s head of partnerships and growth.
Improved automation of the facial recognition technology could make SealNet more useful to more scientists, Dooper said. That would open new opportunities to study the animals and help protect them, he said.
“What this does is help the biologists study the behavior of seals, and also population dynamics,” Dooper said. “Harbor seals are an important indicator species for the ecosystem around them.”
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Read More »Space Tech Helping To Tackle Deforestation
August 2nd, 2022
Via BBC, an article on how space tech helping to tackle deforestation:
Conservationist, Leonidas Nzigiyimpa says “you can’t manage what you don’t know”.
He adds: “In order to improve the situation of forests, we need to use new technology.”
Mr Nzigiyimpa is the chief warden of five protected forestry areas in the small central African country of Burundi.
For the past two decades, he and his team have been working with local communities to protect and manage the forest. His face lights up when he describes the fresh smell and beauty of the areas. “It’s pure nature,” he says.
In carrying out his work, Mr Nzigiyimpa has to consider a range of factors, from monitoring the impact of human actions and economies, to tracking biodiversity and the impact of climate change, plus staff numbers and budgets.
To help him track and record all of this, he now uses the latest version of a free piece of software called the Integrated Management Effectiveness Tool.
The tool was developed specifically for such environmental work by a project called Biopama (Biodiversity and Protected Areas Management Programme). This is supported by both the European Union and the 79 member state Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States.
“So, we use this kind of tool to train the managers of the site to use it to collect good data, and to analyse this data, in order to take good decisions,” says Mr Nzigiyimpa.
Tracking and protecting the world’s forests is not just important for the local communities and economies most directly affected. Deforestation contributes to climate change so restoring forests could help combat it.
Some 10 million hectares (25 million acres) of the world’s forests are lost every year, according to the United Nations.
This deforestation accounts for 20% of all the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, according to the World Wildlife Fund, which adds that “by reducing forest loss, we can reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change”.
To try to restore forests and other natural habitats around the world, the United Nations last year launched the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. This has seen countries, companies and other organisations promise action towards preventing, halting and reversing the degradation of ecosystems worldwide.
“But just saying that we’re going to restore, it’s not enough,” says Yelena Finegold, forestry officer at the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. “There’s the need for responsible planning of how that ecosystem restoration is going to happen, followed by actions on the ground enabled by investments in restoration, and monitoring systems in place to track that ecosystem restoration.”
This increased focus on managing forests has given rise to new digital tools to gather, sort and use data better.
One of these is the FAO’s own Framework for Ecosystem Monitoring (Ferm) website. The site was launched last year, and uses satellite imagery to highlight changes to forests around the world. The maps and data are accessible to any internet users, be they a scientist, government official, business, or member of the public.
A key data source for Ferm is US space agency Nasa, and its Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation system. Known as Gedi for short, this acronym is pronounced like the word Jedi from the Star Wars films. And continuing the theme of that movie series, its tagline is “may the forest be with you”.
The tech itself is certainly very sci-fi turned real life. “We shoot laser beams at trees from the International Space Station,” says Laura Duncanson, who helps to lead the Gedi project from the Univesrity of Marylands’s Department of Geographical Sciences.
“We use the use the reflected energy to map forests in 3D, including their height, canopy density, and carbon content,” adds Dr Duncanson, who is a leading expert in remote sensing. “This is an exciting new technology because for decades we have been able to observe deforestation from space, but now with Gedi we can assign the carbon emissions associated with forest loss [for greater accuracy].”
Maps and data are also provided to Ferm by Norwegian business Planet Labs, which operates more than 200 camera-equipped satellites. These take some 350 million photos of Earth’s surface on a daily basis, each covering an area of one sq km.
Planet Labs can also be directly hired by governments and businesses around the world. In addition to monitoring forests, its cameras can be used to check everything from droughts to agriculture, energy and infrastructure projects, and monitoring key infrastructure, such as ports.
Remi D’Annunzio, a fellow FAO forestry officer, says that all the available imagery from space “has tremendously changed the way we monitor forests, because it has produced extremely repeatable observations and extremely frequent revisits of places”.
He adds: “Basically, now, with all these publicly available satellites combined, we can get a full snapshot of the Earth every four to five days.”
Examples of how all this near real-time monitoring via Ferm is now being used are pilot schemes in Vietnam and Laos that are trying to tackle illegal logging. Rangers and community workers on the ground are sent alerts to their mobile phones when new deforestation is spotted.
“Now, what we’re really trying to do is not just understand the volume of forests being lost, but where is it specifically being lost in this district or that, so that we can monitor loss, and even prevent it in near real-time, from getting worse,” says FAO forestry officer, Akiko Inoguchi.
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Read More »WhatsApp and UN Collaborate To Promote More Sustainable Lifestyles
June 10th, 2022
Via the UN, a report on how – amid the worsening climate crisis – WhatsApp and UN are collaborating to promote more sustainable lifestyles:
In light of rising greenhouse gas emissions and worsening climate impacts around the world, the United Nations ActNow campaign is collaborating with Whatsapp to engage global audiences through an automated messaging service providing tips to shift to more sustainable lifestyles.
“We want to empower people to make climate action an integral part of their daily life and be part of the solution to the climate crisis,” said Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications. “The collaboration with WhatsApp allows us to reach people directly and inspire them to be changemakers.”
The new messaging service, built by Turn.io, offers information on ten actions people can take to make a difference – from switching to a green energy provider, to eating more plant-rich meals, biking instead of driving, saving energy at home, and reusing and repairing clothes. Users can select an action, learn more about it, share it with friends, and log their action.
Targeting primarily individuals in the twenty major economies (G20), which account for close to 80 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the UN’s ActNow campaign, has already seen over 6 million individual climate actions logged through the campaign’s mobile app and messaging functions on Facebook and Instagram.
To tackle the climate crisis, wide-ranging steps needs to be taken first and foremost by governments and businesses. But the transition to a low-carbon world also requires the participation of citizens, especially in advanced economies. Around two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions are linked to private households, when using consumption-based accounting.
According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, shifting consumption patterns, towards cleaner forms of transport or more plant-based foods for example, could cut global greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 40-70 percent by 2050.
The UN Climate Action messaging service on WhatsApp is available in English only for now, with more languages to be launched over the coming months.
To use the service, simply save the number +1 212 738 9268 to your phone contacts and then text the word “hi” in a WhatsApp message to get started. Or just click this link https://wa.me/12127389268?text=hi.
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