Breathing New Life Into Fight to Save the Seas with Artificial Intelligence
doing. Overlaid is a database of regulations and licenses. “The machine learning (system) essentially watches the vessels doing their fishing, works out where their fishing starts and stops and whether they should have been fishing in that location.” That information might be augmented by satellite data from NASA or the European Space Agency.If anything looks amiss, for example a suspected transhipment of people or catch, it gets flagged up to one of OceanMind’s analysts, who can decide what to do next. That usually involves alerting a regulator, who can trigger a deeper investigation
EOMAP Contracted for Shallow Water Bathymetry
of coastal zones, maximizing the use of Copernicus Sentinel missions; this is one of the top priorities for the Copernicus Marine Evolution.” says Angélique Melet, an oceanographer at MOi.“The project will combine multiple techniques to provide global shallow water bathymetry from satellite data. Our focus will be on optical bathymetry and that derived from wave kinematics,” said Mona Reithmeier, project manager at EOMAP. Image courtesy EOMAPThis will be complemented by intertidal bathymetry from the globally recognised Dutch knowledge institute for water and the subsurface, Deltares
CSIRO Deploys World-First Sensors in Great Barrier Reef
sediment run-off, which impacts the UNESCO World Heritage site’s marine ecosystem.The reef is one of seven test sites for CSIRO’s AquaWatch Australia Mission, which is creating a world-first ‘weather service’ for water quality using a combination of specialized sensors and satellite data.Dr Alex Held, CSIRO’s AquaWatch Mission Lead, said the project has the potential to support planning decisions in protecting areas of the reef, which brings in A$5.2 billion annually and generates more than 64,000 full-time jobs."We are testing our systems for monitoring the flow of
Accelerated Evolution and Automated Aquaculture Could Help Coral Weather the Heat
with Traditional Owners. Combining conventional science and traditional knowledge can bring fresh insights. Marine management of Groote Eylandt in Australia’s north now uses maps produced by scientists working with Anindilyakwa people to combine local knowledge, in-water surveys and satellite data.As we move towards large-scale restoration and adaptation, Australia’s First Nations rangers could provide a vital community-based workforce to deliver a new suite of management and conservation activities, especially in remote regions. Traditional Owners could also play important roles
Arctic Ocean Could Be Ice-free In Summer By 2030s, Scientists Say
environment – need to get all of these components right to be able to accurately predict changes in sea ice extent.Melting faster than models predictedBack in the 2000s, an assessment of early generations of climate models found they generally underpredicted the loss of sea ice when compared to satellite data showing what actually happened. The models predicted a loss of about 2.5% per decade, while the observations were closer to 8%.The next generation of models did better but were still not matching observations which, at that time were suggesting a blue ocean event would happen by mid-century.
NOAA Taps Planet to Track Oil Spills, Marine Debris, And Marine Life
caused severe damage in the Gulf of Mexico, including the collapse and sinking of an oil platform. Crude oil from this platform continued to leak for over a decade, in what would become the longest running oil spill in United States history. NOAA began tracking the region with government-provided satellite data to generate reports on the situation. In 2018, NOAA reached out to Planet to explore how having a perspective of change on a near-daily basis around the platform could help inform their work.“With rapidly changing activity in the ocean – from increasingly severe storms to growing
UAF’s GINA Provides a Guiding Hand in Arctic Ocean Research
north than ever before — almost 500 miles beyond Point Barrow.Satellite imagery produced at the Geographic Information Network of Alaska, or GINA, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute helps the Sikuliaq weave its way through the ice.The satellite images, along with satellite data from other sources, show up on the Sikuliaq’s bridge in an easy-to-use web-based map server. The map server has been on the Sikuliaq since 2013, when the ship was built.GINA radar image: An image from the map server shows the Sikuliaq amid the sea ice on Sept. 12, 2021. Photo by Steve RobertsSca
NASA Sends Robots to Study Climate Change in the Arctic
vessels are expensive to operate.“The problem is that almost all of our buoys are located along the coasts of the United States, Europe, near India and Asia and along the tropics. We aren’t able to deploy and maintain buoys in the Arctic,” Gentemann said. “We have to rely on satellite data to understand Arctic ocean temperatures and how they’re changing with climate change.”Saildrone USVs, are autonomous sailboat-like vehicles powered by green technology; they are propelled by wind and use solar-powered sensors. These autonomous vehicles can be steered from computers
NASA, KSLOF Partner to Fast-track Coral Reef Mapping
. In addition to scientific reports on the state of the reefs, the Expedition resulted in the creation of 65,000 square kilometers of high-resolution coral reef habitat maps —or about one-fifth of the world’s coral reefs.Coral reef habitat map of Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, created with satellite data combined with field data from the Global Reef Expedition. Copyright Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation (KSLOF)“When the Foundation launched the Global Reef Expedition in 2006, it was an incredibly ambitious undertaking. We were inventing the technology as we went, pioneering
February 2024
