SkyTruth 2018 Annual Report

If you can see it, you can CHANGE it

Mariscal Nieto Province in Peru, Google Earth ©2014 CNES / Astrium, Digital Globe

2018 Annual Report

If you can see it, you can CHANGE it.

NASA Earth Observatory image modified by SkyTruth

Message From the President

This past fall, on a foggy October evening in San Francisco, almost two-dozen leaders in conservation, technology, and philanthropy brainstormed over dinner at the home of former Google Vice President Matthew Stepka. The topic: applying emerging remote sensing and Big Data technologies to conservation. The convener: SkyTruth. Thanks to help from SkyTruth Board Chair David Shearer and former Board Chair David Festa, SkyTruth led a discussion with major thinkers at the intersection of technology and conservation. Sustained by good wine and the best vegetarian meal I’ve ever eaten, we converged on two major challenges.

The first is the barrage of data emerging from the growing number of satellites in space – numbers that increase every month.  Everyone in the room recognized that we are close to revealing not only what environmental actions occurred a month ago or a year ago, but what actions are occurring right now. How do we sort through the mountains of data available and make it meaningful for conservation?

The second challenge is how do we use that data to generate action on the ground or in the water? In short, how do we translate giving the public more – and more timely – information into real change?

At SkyTruth we’ve been working on the answers.  We believe those answers include giving users control over the information they receive, and creating tools that allow them to interpret it quickly and easily.  It’s a thrilling time for us to be innovating at the intersection of technology and the environment. Read on to learn more about our accomplishments in 2018, and please keep in touch as we build on this work in the year ahead.

2018 Highlights

In 2018 we began a three-year process of revamping our SkyTruth Alerts system to allow users to access more information about pollution spills, drilling activity, forest loss, and more.  At the same time, we’ve made it easier for them to focus on their key areas of interest, identifying specific political boundaries or literally drawing lines on a map. We’ll continue to add capabilities to the Alerts system over the next two years, while enhancing users’ ability to focus only on the information useful to them, and making it easier to act on that information.

We also began laying the foundation for our computer vision work, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify patterns on the landscape that reveal harmful activities. Those patterns can run the gamut, including  new roads that open up remote forests to logging, well pads that signal oil and gas development, vessels fishing in marine protected areas, retention ponds that may hold toxic wastewater, land clearing that often precedes mining, or other features that typically remain hidden in remote locations. With cutting edge algorithms processing scads of data collected from space, we can teach computers to recognize specific features on the ground, revealing these activities as they’re happening.

Guided by our Strategic Plan, we embarked on this process in 2018 and will move forward in 2019 with an initial focus on oil and gas drilling on public lands.  Our AI-powered environmental monitoring platform will allow subscribers such as researchers, advocates, regulators, journalists and others to receive updates about places they care about in near real-time, arming them with information to take action.

We’re calling this new initiative Conservation Vision, and with it, we expect to turbo-charge environmental transparency around the world.

In addition to revamping SkyTruth Alerts and leading the way on Conservation Vision, SkyTruth increased the public’s ability to know and understand how our lands and waters are being managed. Among other things, we:

  • Triggered action by the US Coast Guard on the 14-year old Taylor Energy oil spill;
  • Continued to partner with Global Fishing Watch on identifying transshipment and other illegal activities at sea, and encouraging governments around the world to make their fishing data visible to the public;
  • Created an annually updated mountaintop removal mining footprint dataset for Appalachia;
  • Reached over 5,000 followers on Twitter and 7,000 followers on our Facebook page, and attended or participated in 29 conferences and panels.

And as always, we’ve made all of our work open and free to the public on our website, via social media accounts, and as supporting materials for our peer-reviewed publications.

In 2018 we also spoke with journalists on issues such as offshore drilling, mining, overfishing, illegal fishing, and natural disasters –including Hurricane Florence, which battered the Carolinas with wind and flood damage and left the region with overflowing hog waste lagoons and coal ash ponds. In 2018 we had over 200 media mentions throughout the world. Two highlights in particular stand out: SkyTruth’s lead fisheries analyst, Bjorn Bergman, appeared in the CNBC documentary Oceans of Crime to explain the challenges of combating illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing at sea.  And our dogged work documenting and publicizing the chronic, 14-year-long Taylor Energy oil spill prompted high-profile coverage by the Washington Post that was picked up internationally, and spurred the Coast Guard to finally take aggressive action to end the leak.

I’m proud to say that, because of our unique accomplishments, SkyTruth was named one of the “10 Need-To-Know Innovative Nonprofits” by 1% For The Planet in August.

In the following sections you can read more about what we accomplished in 2018, and why our role as a leading innovator applying satellite technology to environmental conservation continues to grow.

Marble Canyon United States, Google Earth ©2014 Digital Globe, USDA Farm Service Agency

Program Updates

Securing healthy waters and oceans

SkyTruth’s monitoring of the 14-year old Taylor Energy oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico led to real action in 2018, when the US Coast Guard finally ordered Taylor Energy to fix the leak or face a daily $40,000 fine. We first discovered this spill while monitoring the massive BP spill in 2010. Since then, we’ve published dozens of satellite images of the Taylor slick over the years, partnered with local groups in the Gulf region to monitor this ongoing disaster, and kept the story in the news with repeated media interviews. This past fall, our interview with Washington Post reporter Darryl Fears revealed that — based on the latest scientific estimates of the leak rate — the Taylor spill was about to surpass BP’s disastrous 2010 blowout in the Gulf, becoming the world’s worst oil spill. News outlets around the world pounced on this headline, shining a global spotlight on this egregious chronic leak, prompting the Coast Guard to take action.

We continue to work closely with Global Fishing Watch (GFW) staff, after launching it as an independent nonprofit organization in mid-2017. Together, we are providing vessel-monitoring training to authorities in Peru, and continue to work with staff and officials in the fisheries ministry and government of Indonesia.  In February, our co-authored paper, “Tracking the Global Footprint of Fisheries,” was published in the prestigious journal Science. Our finding that the area in the ocean affected by fishing is four times greater than the area of land used for agriculture generated major international media coverage.

We have made significant progress monitoring transshipments, in which fishing vessels deposit their catch on refrigerated cargo ships at sea to avoid detection in port. Our data scientist has been working to develop and validate an algorithm that identifies vessel encounters and loitering behaviors that indicate transshipment activity. We published a transshipment data layer powered by this work in the Global Fishing Watch map and data portal. Additionally, the journal Frontiers in Marine Science published the paper, “Identifying Global Patterns of Transshipment Behavior,” authored by researchers at SkyTruth and GFW. It is the first-ever global assessment of transshipment in a scientific journal, and it describes our work automating the detection of vessel behaviors that enable overfishing, IUU (Illegal, Unregulated and Unreported) fishing, and human rights violations at sea.

“I wanted to let you know that I have been using this graphic regularly in my presentation about the risks for offshore drilling. It’s very effective in explaining that chronic spills are part of the impacts of offshore drilling. Yesterday at a public forum in Malibu Congressman Lieu asked me to share the link with him!”

Restoring clean air and stable climate

In March, we got the good news that an impending auction of oil and gas leases on public lands near Chaco Culture National Historical Park had been cancelled. Our work illustrating the intensity and proximity of existing and proposed drilling to this unparalleled historic resource helped raise the public objections to leasing that prompted this very pro-drilling administration to reconsider.

We are continuing to publish and maintain an interactive map and companion dataset of natural gas flaring events we detect worldwide using nightly satellite imagery that measures light and temperature. We routinely get requests from users for explanation and support, including scientific researchers and private-sector commercial users involved in commodities consulting and forecasting, and alternative power generation projects.

This map shows the 8 lease parcels (red) which had been scheduled for auction on March 8, 2018. Lease parcels which were previously tabled for further review are shown in orange, and Chaco Culture National Historical Park is displayed in green.

Safeguarding lands and communities

Working with Duke University, Appalachian Voices, and Google, we built algorithms to improve our historical mountaintop removal mining analysis, creating and validating an annual mining “footprint” dataset beginning in the 1980’s with updates for every year after. We built an interactive map to allow users to explore the data, including giving them the ability to generate simple reports on mining activity by county and their own areas of interest. We continue to make this data available to research partners who now have several new projects underway, promising to add to the body of research that has already influenced public mining policy and practices.  And we are currently processing the data to publish it, aggregated by state, county, watershed, and other administrative units to make it user-friendly for a broader range of stakeholders.

In July, our paper, “Mapping the yearly extent of surface coal mining in Central Appalachia using Landsat and Google Earth Engine,” was published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The paper provides the first comprehensive map of annual surface coal mining extent in Central Appalachia and the analysis relies on an algorithm our geospatial analysts developed to run on the Google Earth Engine cloud-computing platform.  A key revelation from our work is that the amount of land destroyed to mine a ton of coal has tripled in just the past ten years, a stark indicator of the financial instability of coal mining in Appalachia.  We held a webinar to discuss our work with members of the media and other environmental organizations, generating more media exposure for this issue (including Inside Climate News, Yale e360, ThinkProgress, Smithsonian and others).  And in December our work illustrated a major report from Human Rights Watch, “Deregulating Mountaintop Removal Threatens Drinking Water and Public Health.”

“I am a professor of statistics at the University of Pennsylvania working on a research project on the effect of mountaintop removal mining on health.  I have found the maps that SkyTruth has developed on mountaintop removal mining to be very useful. I am wondering if it is possible to get information on the presence or extent of mountaintop removal mining in a county year by year.”

Protecting a legacy of biodiversity

In 2018 we rebuilt our SkyTruth Alerts system to incorporate the feedback we received from our 2017 user survey. By March we built a working prototype of Alerts 2.0 that included two major upgrades over the original system:  land-cover change alerts automatically detected from satellite imagery; and a monthly time-series of high-resolution satellite images that allow users to zoom in and closely inspect places where change has been detected. Both features are evolving as we work with our partners at Defenders of Wildlife to refine and validate their algorithms for Lesser Prairie Chicken habitat. And we are discussing terms to access satellite imagery from our partners at Planet and other imaging companies.

We also increased the type of information users can access through Alerts or the Alerts maps. These include not only the oil and hazardous materials spill reports from the National Response Center (available since 2012), but also oil and gas reports from selected states, tree cover loss from Global Forest Watch, and pollution violation data from the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2018 we internalized the expertise to “scrape” – that is systematically search agency and other databases – and simplified the process, successfully restoring several broken data streams to the Alerts system, and making it easier for us to add new data sources.  We also ensured that Alerts users can download data into formats that allow them to conduct their own analyses and take action.

In 2018 we began our work on Conservation Vision, that is, using AI to detect changes on land and water that could indicate harmful environmental activities. This platform offers the potential for ubiquitous monitoring and detection of changes in the environment in a timely way to enable effective action. The rapidly increasing availability of daily high quality satellite imagery and geospatial data from an ever growing array of public and private sources, combined with sophisticated tools for handling and analyzing data, makes it possible to automatically monitor, analyze and alert people to activities and incidents of concern.

We’ve started our Conservation Vision journey with oil and gas activities in Pennsylvania. In a poster session in December 2018 at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting, SkyTruth staff Ry Covington and Christian Thomas presented our initial results. We demonstrated that our algorithm could detect the presence of oil and gas infrastructure in Pennsylvania with 84% accuracy, a strong first step.  Our next steps are to improve the accuracy of the algorithm and expand its capabilities to other landscapes – particularly those in the western US.

Once completed, our Conservation Vision platform will allow subscribers such as researchers, advocates, regulators, journalists and others to receive daily updates about the places they care about, in near real-time, arming them with information to take action. And as we’ve demonstrated with the successful launch of Global Fishing Watch, SkyTruth is uniquely positioned to connect technology and data providers with world-class researchers asking critical questions, and with high-impact conservation partners delivering policy success on the ground.

Your team in Indonesia have been amazing.  The booth has been non-stop….huge amount of interest and they have diligently answered questions and done demonstration after demonstration.

Kanab, Utah, United States, Google Earth ©2014 Digital Globe, Landsat, State of Utah, USDA Farm Service Agency

2018 Board of Directors

It’s no small role that SkyTruth’s board of directors plays in ensuring we continue to carry out our mission. We are fortunate to have assembled a group of highly qualified individuals from across the country and many sectors.

John Amos
Walter Ailes
Mary Anne Hitt
Catherine Irwin
Darshan Karwat
Sue Kemnitzer
Monica Medina
Barbara Morgan
Stephen J. Paradis
Alan Septoff
David Shearer
Paul Woods

2018 Funders

SkyTruth gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our funders, including individuals from around the world. Your support makes it possible to illuminate human impact on the planet and inspire conservation solutions through technology. Thank you!

Campbell Foundation
Catena Foundation
Clif Bar Family Foundation

Cornell Douglas Foundation
David and Lucile Packard Foundation

Foundation Beyond Belief
Google
Herbert W. Hoover Foundation/KSU
Oceana
Patagonia
The Heinz Endowments
Tilia Fund
Wallace Genetic Foundation
Walmart Foundation/GFW
Walton Family Foundation

Financials

SkyTruth in the News

SkyTruth on TV

Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj

CNBC’s Oceans of Crime

Peer-Reviewed Papers

Mapping the Yearly Extent of Surface Coal Mining in Central Appalachia Using Landsat and Google Earth Engine

Pericak AA, Thomas CJ, Kroodsma DA, Wasson MF, Ross MRV, Clinton NE, Campagna, DJ, Franklin Y, Bernhardt ES, and Amos JF. (2018) Mapping the yearly extent of surface coal mining in Central Appalachia using Landsat and Google Earth Engine. PLoS ONE 13(7): e0197758. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197758. Read paperBlog post

Identifying Global Patterns of Transshipment Behavior

Miller NA, Roan A, Hochberg T, Amos J and Kroodsma DA (2018) Identifying Global Patterns of Transshipment Behavior. Front. Mar. Sci. 5:240. doi: 10.3389/fmars.2018.00240. Read paperBlog post

Tracking the Global Footprint of Fisheries

Kroodsma DA, Mayorga J, Hochberg T, Miller NA, Boerder K, Ferretti F, Wilson A, Bergman B, White TD, Block BA, Woods P, Sullivan B, Costello C, and Worm B. SCIENCE  : 904-908 Read paperBlog post

SkyTruth uses the view from space to inspire people to protect the environment. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, with offices across the United States and in Indonesia. We believe more transparency leads to better management and better outcomes. By sharing our findings – stunning imagery and robust science-based data – with the public for free, we move policy makers, governments and corporations towards more responsible behavior and more accountability for the environment.