Courtesy of The Verge, a look at Global Fishing Watch, a new initiative to provide insight into the growing fisheries crisis:
Environmental groups have developed a sprawling new surveillance system to help track illegal fishing across the globe. A prototype of the Global Fishing Watch system was announced today at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney, and was spearheaded by Oceana, a conservationist group, with financial and engineering support from Google.
Using satellite data from SpaceQuest and software developed by SkyTruth, the system maps and displays the activity of more than 25,000 fishing ships from 2012 to 2013. Some ships were registered as commercial fishing boats, others behaved in ways that suggested fishing activity. This activity is highlighted on the map by orange and yellow dots.
The idea is to use advanced technology to monitor fishing activity at a time when global stocks are under increased pressure, posing serious environmental and economic threats. A 2013 report from Oceana estimated that illegal fishing costs between $10 billion and $23 billion in global losses every year. For now, Global Fishing Watch only displays ship activity from the previous two years, but Oceana aims to eventually incorporate more recent data that will allow authorities to act quickly.
“[T]he plan is that we will build out a public release version that will have near-real-time data,” Jackie Savitz, Oceana’s VP for US oceans, tells Wired. “Then you’ll actually be able to see someone out there fishing within hours to days.”
Oceana has already used the system to monitor boats that have already been tagged for illegal fishing, though it still doesn’t pick up boats that haven’t registered with the automatic identification system (AIS), as well as vessels that go dark before reaching restricted waters. But the hope is that over time, Global Fishing Watch will serve as an important check to encourage fishers to stay within the law.
“We think this could be a tool for positive reinforcement to reward good fishing behavior,” Brian Sullivan, of Google’s Ocean and Earth Outreach program, tells Wired. “If people can pay a premium for responsibly harvested fish with confidence in the supply chain, that aligns the economic incentives in a powerful way.”
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Via the Smithsonian Magazine, an interesting report on the use of aerial imagery to scan aerial imagery and pinpoint the locations of fracking wastewater ponds in Pennsylvania:
Ever since the natural gas boom took off in Pennsylvania in 2006, some people living near the drilling rigs have complained of headaches, gastrointestinal ailments, skin problems and asthma. They suspect that exposure to the chemicals used in the drilling practice called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, triggers the symptoms. But there’s a hitch: the exact locations of many active fracking sites remain a closely guarded secret.
Brian Schwartz, an environmental epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and his colleagues have teamed up with Geisinger Health System, a health services organization in Pennsylvania, to analyze the digital medical records of more than 400,000 patients in the state in order to assess the impacts of fracking on neonatal and respiratory health.
While the scientists will track where these people live, says Schwartz, state regulators cannot tell them where the active well pads and waste pits are located. Officials at Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) say that they have simply never compiled a comprehensive list.
So the Johns Hopkins researchers turned to a small nonprofit called SkyTruth, which scrutinizes satellite and other aerial imagery to figure out what is happening down here on Earth. The scientists traveled to the group’s headquarters in West Virginia in September 2013 to ask SkyTruth to help them locate Pennsylvania’s fracking wastewater ponds.
Fracking is a process in which a slurry of water mixed with sand and chemical lubricants is pumped underground at high pressure to shatter shale rock and release the natural gas imbedded within it. A portion of the spent fracking liquid shoots back up the well bore and needs to be disposed of. This “flowback” is laden with up to 40 different industrial chemicals and is often radioactive from its exposure to elements, such as radium and thorium, underground. While some of the tainted water is treated and then discharged into local rivers and streams, much of it gets stored in large plastic-lined impoundment ponds. The ponds waft a noxious chemical odor that may be responsible for respiratory problems in nearby residents.
To pinpoint the location of these ponds, SkyTruth launched a project called FrackFinder. They enlisted more than 200 volunteers in public meetings and on social media from as far away as Japan, who have collectively spent thousands of hours poring over satellite images of Pennsylvania’s bucolic landscape. SkyTruth trained its recruits online and with specially designed apps to distinguish regularly-shaped waste ponds from natural ponds and wetlands. Ten different volunteers examined each image to ensure the accuracy of the data.
SkyTruth just released its crowdsourced map, which shows over 500 fracking ponds in Pennsylvania, up from a mere 11 located in photographs taken in 2005.
Volunteers for the FrackFinder project pinpointed the locations of fluid impoundments in 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2013, based on aerial photography taken in those years.
SkyTruth is the brainchild of John Amos, a geologist who began his career analyzing satellite images to advise oil and gas companies where to drill. He noticed that the photos revealed a lot more than just promising geological formations. Amos saw oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Australia and massive clear cuts hacked out of the vast boreal forests of Siberia—deforestation rivaling what is happening in the Amazon in scale.
“What really pushed me over the edge emotionally,” says Amos, “was looking at satellite imagery of western Wyoming, where I got my Master’s degree.” He was shocked to see that an area that had been pristine rangeland when he was going to school during the mid-1980s was, just 10 years later, “a spider’s web of drilling sites, pipelines and access roads.” Public lands had been totally converted for industrial use.
“I wondered why these pictures weren’t on the front pages of the major newspapers of the world,” says Amos. “People need to see this.”
When the first Landsat satellite was launched in 1972, NASA sold single images to interested parties for upwards of $4,000 each. That put the pictures out of reach for all but a few deep-pocketed corporate and academic researchers. Today, the entire Landsat archive of thousands of high-resolution photographs is available free for anyone to download.
This has proven to be a bonanza for citizen science groups like SkyTruth. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, some elected officials claimed that “not one drop of oil” had been spilled from the offshore infrastructures in the Gulf. But SkyTruth used the latest radar-satellite images to document an oil slick covering more than 270 square miles that emanated from known drilling platforms and pipelines—a finding later confirmed by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Five years later, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf, SkyTruth estimated, based on the size of the visible oil plume, that the spill was at least 20 times as large as what BP was claiming at the time.
SkyTruth is the first environmental whistleblower to focus exclusively on sleuthing from the sky. The group’s motto is: “If you can see it, you can change it.” They distribute aerial photographs of everything from mountaintop removal to oil sands development and urban sprawl to the press and environmental groups, and share them with the public through social media. Revealing the ecological destruction that humans are wreaking on the planet, however, is only one aspect of the group’s mission. They also want to get people more engaged.
SkyTruth is the first environmental whistleblower to focus exclusively on sleuthing from the sky.
“Our volunteers get to see what fracking in their area actually looks like. It is an informational experience,” says David Manthos, director of the FrackFinder project. “For some, SkyTruthing may be a stepping stone to writing their elected officials, or putting on waders and going out in the field to take water quality measurements.”
Brent Newman, a graduate student in geography at the University of Maryland, volunteered and was stunned to see how fracking has transformed large swaths of rural Pennsylvania into industrial landscapes. “Just to see the sheer number of fracking ponds was alarming,” says Newman. Motivated by this eye-opening experience, he is currently conducting his own independent research on deforestation due to hydraulic fracturing for his Master’s degree.
People like Brent Newman are part of a growing movement of citizen scientists who are stepping in where government and the shale-gas industry have fallen short, according to Kirk Jalbert, a doctoral student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Jalbert, who has been doing research on several water-monitoring groups in Pennsylvania, distinguishes between two very different types of citizen science.
“You might get an academic researcher who asks 100 or 200 people to parse through data and tell him where DNA strands connect,” says Jalbert. “But that doesn’t produce engaged citizens, it teaches people to connect dots. Producing engaged citizens means having people frame and pursue the questions that they want answered.”
Questions like, how is fracking affecting my water supply?
“The majority of the participants [in the fracking monitoring groups] don’t see themselves as activists,” according to Jalbert. “People tell me, ‘you know I grew up in this county, I swam in these streams, my kids swim in these streams, there’s a gas pad that’s going in on the ridge up there, and I want to make sure that they don’t screw up my water.’”
Now that the SkyTruth fracking map is completed, the Johns Hopkins epidemiological study is gearing up. They are now checking whether asthma patients who live near natural gas sites have suffered exacerbations of their illness. The researchers hope to have preliminary results on this within the next few months.
For SkyTruth, the investigation of fracking in Pennsylvania is only the beginning. The group recently launched a partnership with Walsh University in North Canton, Ohio, where volunteers will be mapping the “ecological footprint” of shale drilling, or how much forest was cleared and agricultural land converted to industrial use. Pending adequate funding, Texas— with 6,000 oil and gas fracking wells, the largest number of any state—is on their radar to tackle next.
“It’s a big planet,” says Amos. But looked at from above, we come to recognize it as home. “Time and again, we’ve seen how pictures motivate people to pay attention, to care about a place, and—hopefully—to take action if they see something they don’t like.”
Via New York Magazine, a profile of an interesting company Planet Labs:
Planet Labs satellites in orbit. Photo: Planet Labs Inc.
The email inbox of a tech writer is a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade of garbage — thousands of pitches for ill-conceived, duplicative, morally bankrupt, or otherwise useless companies that, 19 times out of 20, have no larger bearing on the world. A shovel-sharing start-up. The 347th disappearing-photo-sharing app. A Kickstarter to fund Google Glass for cats. Recently, with things like Yo and Push for Pizza actually taking off, the tech industry has seemed almost competitively dumb, with companies falling over themselves to seek attention by appealing to the lowest common denominator.
And then, once in a long while, you come across something that reminds you that, yes, Silicon Valley is still doing some very worthwhile things.
That happened to me yesterday, with a start-up called Planet Labs.
Planet Labs is based in San Francisco. Here is its website. It is a company that makes small, cheap satellites and puts them into outer space to take high-resolution pictures of the earth. It was started in 2010 by a group of NASA engineers who got frustrated with how long government-funded space projects took to complete, and decided to strike out on their own. It has raised something like $65 million from some of the same investors who backed Facebook, Twitter, Tesla, and other popular Silicon Valley companies. If you haven’t heard of them, it’s because they’ve been avoiding most interviews with the media until they’re further along in the development process.
I went to Planet Labs’ office yesterday, after its PR rep invited me in for a tour. (The rep said he wasn’t looking for me to write a story; he just wanted to show me the place. “No agenda,” he wrote. I didn’t believe him, but agreed anyway.) Planet Labs’ president and co-founder, Robbie Schingler, and its director of community engagement, ShannonSpanhake, led me on a tour through the office. It’s a smallish space with about 70 employees on the first floor of a nondescript building that houses several other start-ups, and looks at first blush like every other tech office in San Francisco. There’s a fridge full of fancy sodas and cans of sparkling yerba maté. A drum set tucked in a corner. A whiteboard with math equations on it. Rows of focused coders, some sitting on yoga balls, some parked at standing desks, all typing into their terminals. It smelled vaguely of Febreze.
Unlike most start-ups, Planet Labs’ launch schedule is literal. They’ve put 71 satellites into orbit in the last 16 months, and are currently on the 12th build of their mini-satellite. (For purposes of comparison, most NASA satellites cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and take up to a decade to build and launch.) Planet Labs satellites, nicknamed “doves,” are smaller than a loaf of bread, and are assembled using mostly off-the-shelf parts, some from cell phone and tablet manufacturers. As a result, they’re very cheap to make — though the company wouldn’t say how much each one costs to build, it’s been estimated by outsiders that they’re 95 percent cheaper than a normal satellite.
These satellites do what lots of satellites do — take photos of the Earth’s surface, and transmit them back to base stations — but the difference is that there are dozens of them. Eventually, Planet Labs will have hundreds of satellites orbiting simultaneously, capturing every inch of the Earth’s surface to create a comprehensive picture of what the planet looks like every 24 hours. (Again, for purposes of comparison, most existing satellite images — including the ones used by Google Maps — are patched together from multiple satellite sources, and capture images of the same spot every few weeks or months.)
Chester Gillmore, Planet Labs’s director of manufacturing operations, works on a satellite. Photo: Planet Labs Inc.
Chester Gillmore, the company’s director of manufacturing operations, asks me to put on a protective lab coat and takes me through the back room, where the satellites are made. I cannot emphasize this point enough: Planet Labs makes actual things, things you can hold in your hand, things that go to outer space. For a guy who’s used to being pitched on beta-version apps, crowd-funding projects, and incomprehensible cloud platforms, the idea of a start-up making something as tangible as a satellite makes me deliriously giddy.
Planet Labs has fun, by the looks of things. (Tucked just off their manufacturing lab is a nap room with Star Wars sheets on the beds. About half the company is going to Burning Man next week, a data point that should not be used against it.) But its mission is very serious. They want to use the images their satellites capture to create a huge, searchable database that can be used to track changes to the Earth in real time. Some of the customers who will eventually purchase this data are conservation groups who want to see the effects of climate change on the Earth; others are insurance companies who want to track the well-being of properties they cover; others could include government agencies, hedge funds, transportation companies, and NASA itself.
But right now, Planet Labs is focusing on getting as many of these satellites up as possible. The way they do this is by paying anyone who’s launching rockets — which, right now, means mostly the U.S., Japan, and Russia — to let them park their devices in a side compartment on the way up, and releasing them into space once they’ve reached orbiting altitude. In February, they deployed a group of 28 satellites from the International Space Station.
Schingler shows me some of the photos these satellites take. Thanks to some auto-stabilizing and focusing technology I don’t really understand, they’re very good — much clearer and more detailed than the ones you find on Google Maps. And you can see how having lots of them coming in every day could be useful. Recently, one of the company’s satellites was able to capture images of a forest fire in California and alert the authorities ten minutes before it had been reported on the news. Here are a few others they’ve taken:
Irrigated fields in Arizona. Photo: Planet Labs Inc.
The Castaic Reservoir in California. Photo: Planet Labs Inc.
I have no idea if Planet Labs will succeed as a business. (One of its competitors, Skybox Imaging, was bought by Google in June for $500 million, so you have to think its chances are decent.) But I hope it does. Their vision is ambitious but manageable: They’re basically taking a fast, iterative softwarelike approach to the traditionally lumbering process of putting satellites into orbit, using materials and a design process that allows them to do it for much less money than the traditional methods. It won’t save millions of lives, but it’s cool, novel, and, yes, even a little disruptive.
I know my view of the tech world is biased toward fluff and B.S. — as a guy who writes about overwhelmingly consumer-oriented start-ups, many of the industry’s boring but important projects stay cloistered from my view. But it was refreshing to see, in the course of an hour-long visit with a little satellite company, that the higher, better ambitions of Silicon Valley are still alive and well. Even if they’re sometimes hard to find.
Via Take Part, an article on how the use of satellite technology could help California manage its remaining groundwater supplies:
With California already suffering through a devastating drought, another water catastrophe has emerged: The state is quickly depleting its groundwater reserves.
Reservoirs, creeks, and rivers usually supply a large portion of California’s water for drinking and irrigation. With that water in short supply, farmers pump groundwater by drilling wells. Because of the drought, groundwater is now furnishing close to 70 percent of the state’s water, up from 40 percent in a typical year, according to Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine.
“We’re poised for a major run on groundwater,” he said, noting that water restrictions have sparked a well-drilling frenzy in some regions, leading people to drain groundwater faster than it can be replaced. A state report released in May shows that groundwater levels have hit record lows since 2008.
Worse, California lacks a statewide system to regulate groundwater pumping. But that could soon change. State lawmakers have approved a bill requiring local agencies to develop groundwater-management plans, and the state will release a draft blueprint later this year—which could lead to the monitoring and reporting of groundwater withdrawals, restrictions on how much farmers can pump, and fines for pumping too much.
The key to enforcing the law: satellites. They’re already giving scientists a bird’s-eye view of underground water resources—and could be central to providing the state with detailed information about how much groundwater remains and how much water farms consume.
“We need more detailed information to actively manage the water basins,” said Lester Snow, executive director of the California Water Foundation in Sacramento and a former director of the California Department of Water Resources.
Since 2003, Famiglietti has been using data from GRACE, a joint U.S.-German satellite mission, to monitor groundwater depletion from space. The data show that water levels in the San Joaquin and Sacramento river basins were at their lowest levels in a decade by December 2013.
The Central Valley’s reserves are shrinking by 800 billion gallons a year. Famiglietti also sees close correlations between surface water allocations and groundwater reserves. When allocations are high, groundwater levels recover, but when they’re restricted—as they are now—“groundwater is hit very hard,” he said.
GRACE can give California an overview of its groundwater resources, but it can’t tell officials how much groundwater each farm uses.
Groundwater used for irrigation ends up in one of three places: It evaporates from the ground, is soaked up by growing plants, or trickles into the soil to recharge the groundwater. Plants also release some of the water as vapor (called transpiration) during photosynthesis.
Although a water meter attached to a groundwater pump can track how much water a farmer withdraws from the ground, it doesn’t show how much is returned to the aquifer or lost to the air by evaporation or transpiration.
Satellites can also provide detailed information about this water loss—how much water agricultural producers withdraw permanently from the system. Richard Allen, a water resources engineer at the University of Idaho, uses images of vegetation and temperature from a Landsat satellite to calculate rates of evapotranspiration and estimate water use. He feeds the information into a computer model called METRIC (Mapping Evapotranspiration at High Resolution With Internalized Calibration), which allows him to see how much water is being consumed from one field to the next.
METRIC has been used in Idaho to quantify groundwater consumption from the Snake River Plain aquifer, which supports two million acres of irrigated land. Allen said METRIC helps monitor and manage water rights, identify illegal pumping, and provide better information about consumption.
“If farmers were asked to pay for groundwater, METRIC could give an accurate assessment of pumping over the course of a growing season,” said Allen. “We could send you an image that shows you how much water you used.”
Although there’s interest in California to include satellite-based measurements of groundwater and its consumption, bridging the gap between research and statewide operation takes time. But Famiglietti remains optimistic. “The results we have been getting are good, and they’re only going to get better,” he said.
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Courtesy of Yale’s Environment360, a look at several initiatives that use Earth observation satellites to measure and monitor global climate change:
1. NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) is one of five Earth-observing missions launched in 2014 — the most in a single year in more than a decade. OCO-2, which joins a set of five observation satellites already orbiting the Earth, will monitor the global carbon cycle by measuring how atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbs individual bands, or wavelengths, of sunlight. The satellite will collect roughly one million measurements per day, although only about a tenth of those are expected to be cloud-free enough to provide useable data. The two-year mission will allow scientists to track sources of CO2 emissions and the “sinks” where it is absorbed from the atmosphere.
2. Launched in 2010 as part of the European Space Agency’s Earth Explorer program, CryoSat-2 is the first mission specifically targeted at measuring changes in polar sea ice thickness, one indicator of warming seas. The satellite orbits 700 kilometers above the Earth at latitudes 88° North and South. It uses a Synthetic Aperture Interferometric Radar Altimeter (SIRAL) to measure changes in land ice elevation and sea ice thickness relative to ocean surface levels, giving researchers a better understanding of changes in the volume of polar sea ice. CryoSat-2’s altimeter also measures sea level, including localized ocean phenomena such as eddies, storm surges, and the ocean floor with unprecedented accuracy. This image shows Arctic sea ice as measured by CryoSat-2 in April 2013.
3. Comprising 3.5 percent of the ocean, salt plays a major role in both regulating ocean currents and moderating Earth’s climate. The Aquarius Mission, a partnership between NASA and Argentina’s space program (the Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales), helps scientists better understand how surface salinity levels affect heat and water exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere. Because salinity levels are affected by precipitation, evaporation, freshwater inputs, and melting ice, scientists can use Aquarius to trace changes in the global water cycle. This image depicts sea surface salinity as measured in June 2014. Reds show higher salinity (40 grams per kilogram), and purples show relatively low salinity (30 grams per kilogram).
4. Originally created in 1978 by the United States and the French space agency to monitor meteorological and oceanographic conditions, the Argos system is now used for a variety of observations, including tracking terrestrial, avian, and aquatic wildlife migrations. Biologists attach small tags, called platforms, to wildlife, and the platforms continuously transmit signals to orbiting satellites, enabling scientists to determine wildlife locations. With 21,000 animals tagged worldwide, scientists use Argos to monitor how migratory species such as manta rays, Alaska’s porcupine caribou herd, and albatrosses adapt to global change. This image is an example of an Argos map showing platform locations.
5. Farmers are facing increasing uncertainty due to climate change. Programs such as the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2, part of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service, monitor soil moisture conditions and forecast crop yields so that farmers can apply water and chemicals more accurately and efficiently. In addition to site-specific crop and plant health, Copernicus satellites detect variables such as measures of global vegetation, water cycling, and heat emitted from the Earth’s surface. These technologies promote what is called “precision farming” and help farmers maintain high crop yields amid changing climatic conditions. This image, captured near Garden City, Kansas, reveals circular crop plots in infrared.
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Via Quartz, an interesting look at the use of Google Earth in the battle against overfishing:
Weapons-grade uranium isn’t the only thing Iran may be hiding. The country does not report its fishing catch to the United Nations, which is problematic given that the Persian Gulf, like other areas of the world, suffers from overfishing. But thanks to Google Earth, scientists now know that Iran hauls in more than 12,000 tonnes a year from 728 weirs, large structures built in intertidal zones to trap fish.
In a first of its kind study released today, scientists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver used Google Earth images to calculate how much fish was actually caught by Persian Gulf nations compared to what they reported. The result: The official numbers are nothing but one big fish tale. Researchers Dalal Al-Abdulrazzak and Daniel Pauly estimated the fish catch in 2005, for instance, was 31,433 tonnes, six times what nations bordering the Persian Gulf reported. “Our results document the unreliability of catch data from the Persian Gulf, a small part of a global misreporting problem,” the authors write in the study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science.
“Underreporting fish catches can jeopardize a country’s food security, economy, not to mention impact entire marine ecosystems,” Al-Abdulrazzak told Quartz in an email. “This is particularly important in the case of the Persian Gulf, where fisheries are the second most important natural resource after oil.”
A Persian Gulf weir.
It’s just the latest use of Google Earth satellite images to monitor environmental destruction, such as illegal logging in remote locations. Similarly, the researchers say Google Earth can be used to detect illegal fishing and underreporting of fish catches. To give some “ground truth” to the Persian Gulf’s fisheries take, Al-Abdulrazzak and Pauly studied Google Earth images from 2005 to 2010. Unlike fishing boats, weirs are big structures—as long as 321 meters (1,053 feet)—that remain anchored in place and are easily detected by satellites. The researchers spotted 1,656 weirs in 2005. But after running an algorithm to correct for poor visibility, they estimated there were actually around 1,900 weirs.
Locations of Persian Gulf weirs.
The scientists used a Google ruler tool to measure the size of each weir’s traps and then calculated daily fish catch based on historical records, the length of the fishing season and composition of fish species, such as mackerel, crab, lobster and sardines, at each location.
Half the weirs belonged to Bahrain, giving that nation 54% of the Persian Gulf’s estimated catch. Bahrain’s actual catch was 142% higher than what it reported to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, according to the study. Iran accounted for 37% of weirs and 39% of the region’s fish catch.
At least one nation was more or less honest. The researchers found that the estimated catch for Kuwait was within 300 tonness of what it reported to the UN.
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New technical innovations such as location-tracking devices, GPS and satellite communications, remote sensors, laser-imaging technologies, light detection and ranging” (LIDAR) sensing, high-resolution satellite imagery, digital mapping, advanced statistical analytical software and even biotechnology and synthetic biology are revolutionizing conservation in two key ways: first, by revealing the state of our world in unprecedented detail; and, second, by making available more data to more people in more places. The mission of this blog is to track these technical innovations that may give conservation the chance – for the first time – to keep up with, and even get ahead of, the planet’s most intractable environmental challenges. It will also examine the unintended consequences and moral hazards that the use of these new tools may cause.Read More
A Persian Gulf weir.
Locations of Persian Gulf weirs.