Tag Archives: SkyTruth
We’ve surrounded the Earth with surveillance satellites, but who is that good for?
It is no longer just advanced militaries and rich corporations who can keep tabs on what people are up to half a world away. Watchdogs such as Global Forest Watch, Global Fishing Watch, and SkyTruth are combing through satellite photos and radar scans to alert authorities to illegal clear-cutting, rogue fishing, mountaintop removals, and other environmental misbehavior. Researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have exploited Amazon cloud servers to assemble millions of amateur birdwatcher reports into exquisite animated maps that plot the changing abundance of 122 bird species throughout North America. Ranchers are stapling health-monitoring microchips to their livestock. Beekeepers are sticking wireless sensors into their hives. Farmers are planting high-tech electronics into the soil along with their crops. >click to read< 16:17
Wait, So How Much of the Ocean Is Actually Fished?
How much of the world’s oceans are affected by fishing? In February, a team of scientists led by David Kroodsma from the Global Fishing Watch published a paper that put the figure at 55 percent—an area four times larger than that covered by land-based agriculture. The paper was widely covered, with several outlets leading with the eye-popping stat that “half the world’s oceans [are] now fished industrially.” Ricardo Amoroso from the University of Washington had also been trying to track global fishing activity and when he saw the headlines, he felt that the 55 percent figure was wildly off. He and his colleagues re-analyzed the data that the Global Fishing Watch had made freely available. And in their own paper, published two weeks ago, they claim that industrial fishing occurs over just 4 percent of the ocean. How could two groups have produced such wildly different answers using the same set of data? >click to read<21:21
Global Fishing Watch: Google’s Big Data Overfishing Project Flounders
Last month at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia, Google unveiled a project it bills as a groundbreaking leap in the use of cloud computing, big data, and satellite networks—all to stamp out overfishing. The program, Global Fishing Watch, launched in beta with the help of environmental outfits Oceana and SkyTruth, uses the signals from Automatic Identification Systems (emergency devices installed in all major ships) to plot the trajectory of every commercial fishing vessel on the ocean. Read the rest here 21:45
The Eye in the Sky – Google, SkyTruth And Oceana Target Illegal Fishing With New Technology
SkyTruth, Oceana and Google announced Global Fishing Watch, a big data technology platform that leverages satellite data to create the first global view of commercial fishing. A prototype was unveiled at the 2014 IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia, with a public release version in development, SkyTruth said. Read the rest here 12:42
