Orbital Insight
August 19th, 2015
Via Red Bulletin, an interesting look at Orbital Insight, a geospatial Big Data company leveraging the rapidly growing availability of satellite, UAV, and other geospatial data sources, to understand and characterize socio-economic trends at global, regional, and hyper-local scales:
La forêt de Mariba, Ouganda : le 27 novembre 2001 (à gauche), le 25 janvier 2006 (à droite).
What?
Technology that monitors deforestation.
Why?
To protect the world’s forests.
When?
Now. California startup Orbital Insight has partnered with Global Forest Watch to create a system that monitors and flags suspicious changes around forested areas, such as unexpected new roads. As the system’s neural network recognizes more and increasingly detailed patterns, it will become more accurate at detecting changes and helping to prevent illegal deforestation.
,
Read More »China To Use Satellites, Drones To Monitor Pollution
August 5th, 2015
Via Eco-Business, an interesting report on a new Chinese initiative to use technology to monitor their environment:
China will build a comprehensive network to detect pollution of the land, sea and air by 2020, employing satellites, drones and remote sensors to monitor the environment.
The national leadership approved the network plan in July, saying the government will lead the monitoring, share information among departments and regions, and be held accountable if violations are found, the Ministry of Environmental Protection said on Tuesday.
Satellites, a major tool for monitoring air pollution, will receive a boost this year. The ministry said it will accelerate research on two atmospheric environmental monitoring satellites and two satellites with higher resolution than those currently available.
The ministry will improve a remote sensor network, guided by the goals of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), which is scheduled to be released at the end of this year, according to the ministry’s Environmental Supervision Department.
Remote monitoring has played a bigger role in locating pollution sources. Drones helped authorities locate polluted areas in the Tengger Desert in northern China and identify scattered summer straw burnings.
Hebei province, which has a serious air pollution problem, has cooperated with the ministry’s Satellite Environment Center to conduct monitoring from satellites and monitoring stations since January last year.
“We used the data from the center’s satellites to forecast the movement of smog during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings in November,” Zhang Feng, an engineer in the Environmental Supervision Department of the provincial environmental watchdog, said on Tuesday.
Data collected from monitoring stations helped authorities provide accurate forecasts on hazy days during that period, he said.
Currently, the environmental satellites are used as support tools, as there are not enough of them, Zhang said. After the province builds a system to analyze and process data by the end of this year, the satellites will become more important.
The ministry will also strengthen the supervision of data collected through multiple channels, which is “important to keep the environmental management policies and measures effective and scientific”, Chen Jining, the environmental minister, said in July.
,
Read More »NASA Satellite Data Help Show Where Groundwater Is – And Where It Isn’t
June 25th, 2015
Via the World Resources Institute (WRI), a report on the use of satellite data to better manage groundwater use:
Imagine you’re a wheat farmer in Rajasthan, a state in northwestern India. Wheat needs more water than rains provide, especially during the dry season. So you drill a well.
You don’t have to pay for the water you use or the electricity that powers your pump, so you let the pump run. While you know the water comes from an aquifer somewhere beneath your feet, it’s invisible, diffused throughout layers of soil and rock. Draining an aquifer is therefore very different from draining a reservoir, where you can see the water level drop.
You and your neighbors, and other farms, companies and cities around the world, keep withdrawing water from these underground sources with little regard for how much water they use and how much is left. People have an incentive – and no disincentive – to tap as much groundwater as they can. The result is a race to the bottom of the aquifer.
The results of this very local phenomenon were captured on a global scale by research released last week by NASA and the University of California, Irvine. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites showed that many of the world’s biggest aquifers are being depleted at a much faster rate than they can be replenished, from the Middle East, India, North Africa and Central Asia to California’s Central Valley.
These data and analyses are critically important, raising awareness about an underreported issue and looming crisis, and allowing governments, development organizations, companies and researchers around the world to concentrate their groundwater work on the worst-suffering areas.
However, there’s far more work to be done. That motivates WRI’s Water Team to focus on other key contextual elements: the combined effect of competition for surface water, groundwater depletion, and sharpening our comprehensive understanding of groundwater resources themselves, from current water table levels to sustainable withdrawal rates and more.
Dry Surface? Look Out Below
Both supply and demand must be a part of any discussion about dwindling water resources. All the critical regions identified by GRACE face high to extremely high water stress in surface rivers and streams. In highly water-stressed areas, 40 to 100 percent of the local water supply is withdrawn by businesses, farmers, residents and other consumers every year. WRI’s Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas maps water stress around the world. The Middle East appears in the Atlas as a quilt of dark red and grey, indicating arid and extremely high water stressed areas where users withdraw 80 percent or more of the available, annually renewable surface water every year.
Farther east, India’s water stress shows a similar pattern to GRACE’s groundwater-level decline map. A large swath of extremely high surface water stress covers northwestern India. With limited surface water, it’s no surprise that the region’s farmers are withdrawing groundwater more quickly than anywhere else on Earth, making the water situation even more precarious. Across the country, 54 percent of 4,000 measured groundwater wells are declining.
California’s Central Valley is another exceptionally productive agricultural region that raised red flags for groundwater depletion in the GRACE analysis. WRI mapped the competition for naturally occurring surface water in California over its irrigated agricultural land, and once again, surface water stress mirrors areas of high groundwater stress very closely. About 66 percent of the state’s irrigated agriculture faces extremely high levels of baseline water stress. It’s long been known that Central Valley groundwater is being pumped at unsustainable rates. In the midst of California’s current epic drought, with no natural replenishment of aquifers and over-pumping, groundwater tables are declining alarmingly.
Improving Global Groundwater Estimates
As valuable as GRACE’s groundwater data is, it has a crucial gap: it cannot show the total volume of groundwater available in the aquifers it tracks, only the rate of decline. Without knowing when the aquifers will go dry, or when water tables will sink so low that they are effectively inaccessible, users and water managers are blind to the scope and severity of their problems.
A global dataset for volumes of water stored in aquifers would be invaluable, but is still many years away. At WRI, we are planning a new global groundwater data layer for the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas as a first step. In collaboration with Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Deltares, a Dutch water research organization, we are preparing more detailed models of groundwater. We will create a comprehensive, high-resolution groundwater risk map for groundwater levels and extraction rates around the world. We are also planning a groundwater stress map to illustrate the ratio of recharge to depletion in a given aquifer every year.
Groundwater is a valuable resource the world over. Managed sustainably, it can support food production and growing cities and businesses. But truly understanding the nature of this critical resource, how much groundwater there is, how long it may last in different places at current rates of extraction, and what sustainable recharge rates are, is essential for many countries’ future economic development.
,
Read More »GRACE Satellite Mission Indicates Global Groundwater Diminishing
June 24th, 2015
Via Future Directions International, a look at how satellites are tracking the growing scarcity of groundwater around the globe: ,
Read More »A Virtual Dragnet: Using Satellites To Combat Illegal Overfishing
January 31st, 2015
Via The Economist, a report on a new satellite-based surveillance system keeping a close eye on illegal overfishing:
THE Yongding is something of a ghost ship, disappearing and changing her name many times, along with her flag of registration. The 62-metre vessel was last spotted on January 13th in a marine conservation area in the Southern Ocean, blatantly hauling up outlawed gill nets laden with toothfish, a catch so prized that it is known as “white gold”. Interpol is seeking information about who operates the ship and profits from its activities, as well as those of two accompanying vessels, Kunlun (pictured above, landing a toothfish) and Songhua. In the vastness of the open ocean, policing vessels like Yongding, Kunlun and Songhua is hard. But it is about to get easier—for with just a few mouse clicks a satellite-based monitoring system, unveiled this week, will be able to compile a dossier of evidence about even the most clandestine fishing operations.
The scale of illegal and unreported fishing is, for obvious reasons, difficult to estimate. The Pew Charitable Trusts, an American research group, has nevertheless had a stab at it. It reckons that around one fish in five sold in restaurants or shops has been caught outside the law. That may amount to 26m tonnes of them every year, worth more than $23 billion. This illegal trade, though not the only cause of overfishing, is an important one. Stamping it out would help those countries whose resources are being stolen. It would also help to conserve fish stocks, some of which are threatened with extinction. It might even (if the more apocalyptic claims of some ecologists are well founded) slow down the journey towards a wider extinction crisis in the oceans.
The new monitoring system has been developed by the Satellite Applications Catapult, a British government-backed innovation centre based at Harwell, near Oxford, in collaboration with Pew. In essence, it is a big-data project, pulling together and cross-checking information on tens of thousands of fishing boats operating around the world. At its heart is what its developers call a virtual watch room, which resembles the control centre for a space mission. A giant video wall displays a map of the world, showing clusters of lighted dots, each representing a fishing boat.The data used to draw this map come from various sources, the most important of which are ships’ automatic identification systems (AIS). These are like the transponders carried by aircraft. They broadcast a vessel’s identity, position and other information to nearby ships and coastal stations, and also to satellites. An AIS is mandatory for all commercial vessels, fishing boats included, with a gross tonnage of more than 300. Such boats are also required, in many cases, to carry a second device, known as a VMS (vessel monitoring system). This transmits similar data directly to the authorities who control the waters in which the vessel is fishing, and carrying it is a condition of a boat’s licence to fish there. Enforcement of the AIS regime is patchy, and captains do sometimes have what they feel is a legitimate reason for turning it off, in order not to alert other boats in the area to profitable shoals. But the VMS transmits only to officialdom, so there can be no excuse for disabling it. Switching off either system will alert the watch room to potential shenanigans.
The watch room first filters vessels it believes are fishing from others that are not. It does this by looking at, for example, which boats are in areas where fish congregate. It then tracks these boats using a series of algorithms that trigger an alert if, say, a vessel enters a marine conservation area and slows to fishing speed, or goes “dark” by turning off its identification systems. Operators can then zoom in on the vessel and request further information to find out what is going on. Satellites armed with synthetic-aperture radar can detect a vessel’s position regardless of weather conditions. This means that even if a ship has gone dark, its fishing pattern can be logged. Zigzagging, for example, suggests it is long-lining for tuna. When the weather is set fair, this radar information can be supplemented by high-resolution satellite photographs. Such images mean, for instance, that what purports to be a merchant ship can be fingered as a transshipment vessel by watching fishing boats transfer their illicit catch to it.
As powerful as the watch room is, though, its success will depend on governments, fishing authorities and industry adopting the technology and working together, says Commander Tony Long, a 27-year veteran of the Royal Navy who is the director of Pew’s illegal-fishing project. Those authorities need to make sure AIS and VMS systems are not just fitted, but are used correctly and not tampered with. This should get easier as the cost of the technology falls.
Enforcing the use of an identification number that stays with a ship throughout its life, even if it changes hands or country of registration, is also necessary. An exemption for fishing boats ended in 2013, but the numbering is still not universally applied. Signatories to a treaty agreed in 2009, to make ports exert stricter controls on foreign-flagged fishing vessels, also need to act. Fishermen seek out ports with lax regulations to land illegal catches.
Preserving Nature’s bounty
One of the most promising ideas for using the watch room is that shops could employ its findings to protect their supply chains, and thus their reputations for not handling what are, in effect, stolen goods. Governments sometimes have reason to drag their feet about enforcing fisheries rules. Supermarkets, though, will generally want to be seen as playing by them. The watch room’s developers say they are already in discussions with a large European supermarket group to do just this.
The watch room will also allow the effective monitoring of marine reserves around small island states that do not have the resources to do it for themselves. The first test of this approach could be to regulate a reserve of 836,000 square kilometres around the Pitcairn Islands group, a British territory in the middle of the South Pacific with only a few dozen inhabitants.
The Pitcairn reserve, which may be set up later this year, will be one of the world’s largest marine sanctuaries. By proving that the watch room can keep an eye on such a remote site, its developers hope other places with similar requirements will be encouraged to get involved.
The watch-room system is, moreover, capable of enlargement as new information sources are developed. One such may be nanosats. These are satellites, a few centimetres across, that can be launched in swarms to increase the number of electronic eyes in the sky while simultaneously reducing costs. Closer to the surface, unmanned drones can do the same. The watch room, then, is a work in progress. But in the game of cat and mouse that enforcing fishing regulations has become, it will give the cat an important advantage.
,
Read More »Joint Chinese-Brazilian Satellite Program Helps Save Amazonian Forests
December 1st, 2014
Via China Daily, a report on a joint Chinese-Brazilian monitoring program:
Deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon dropped 18 percent this year, reaching the second-lowest recorded level since monitoring started in 1988, the Brazilian Ministry of Environment announced in a press briefing on Nov 24.
According to the data, an estimated 4,848 square kilometers of forests were cleared in the 12-month period to June 2014, compared with 5,891 square kilometers in the previous 12-month period.
“In the last five years Brazil registered the five lowest deforestation rates ever recorded for the Amazon,” Brazil’s Minister of Environment Izabella Teixeira said.
The rate is an estimate based on analysis of satellite images from Landsat and the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS), a series of remote sensing satellites built by Brazil and China, each covering an area up to 6.25 hectares.
The CBERS Program was born from a partnership signed between Brazil and China on July 6, 1988, and renewed in 2004, in the space technical scientific segment. The program involves the Chinese Academy of Space Technology (CAST), and the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), to develop a program to build and operate two advanced remote sensing satellites.
With the financial and technological resources from China and Brazil, an investment exceeding $300 million, a system of shared responsibilities was created (70 percent Chinese and 30 percent Brazilian) with the intent to implement a complete system of remote sensing internationally.
With the program, Brazil has obtained a powerful tool to monitor its huge territory by its own remote sensing satellites, looking forward to consolidate an important autonomy in this segment.
The CBERS’s family of remote sensing satellites brought to Brazil significant scientific advances. This significance is attested by the more than 35,000 users from more than 2,500 organizations registered as active CBERS users, and also by the 800,000 CBERS images, distributed at the approximate rate of 250 every day.
Images generated by CBERS satellites are used in important areas, as deforestation control and environmental monitoring in the Amazon Region, water resources monitoring, urban growth, soil occupation, education and several other applications.
It is also fundamental for large national and strategic projects, for example Brazilian Amazon Forest Satellite Monitoring Project (PRODES), which evaluates and monitors the deforestation of the sugar-cane areas.
This time, the data provided through the PRODES project is carried out by Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE).
The data will be consolidated during the first half of 2015 and submitted by the Brazilian government for external auditing. The new 2014 data represents a reduction of 83 percent in deforestation rates compared to 2004 levels, and indicate a resumption of the trend of falling deforestation in Brazil.
Deforestation rates dropped in most Brazilian states in the Amazon region. Historically marked by high rates of cleared forests, the state of Para showed a 22 percent drop in deforestation, with 1,829 square kilometers of cleared forest recorded in the 12 months to June 2014, compared with 2,346 square kilometers recorded in the previous 12 months. The most significant reduction was registered in the state of Maranhao where the rate of deforestation fell by 39 percent. Increases were registered only in the states of Roraima (37 percent) and Acre (41 percent).
According to Minister Teixeira, the reduction is a result of several factors including the work of enforcement teams and a task force for the environmental regularization of rural properties, in accordance with the new Forestry Code.
The new numbers bring Brazil closer to meeting its voluntary climate change mitigation targets established under the National Policy on Climate Change, aimed at reducing projected greenhouse gas emissions by between 36.1 and 39.6 percent by 2020.
“All the work on Brazil’s climate agenda is being carried out,” said Minister Teixeira.
The 20th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP20) starts next week, in Lima, Peru, where representatives from 190 countries will discuss new reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions.
,
Read More »