SkyTruth Alerts is better than ever. Learn how to make our new Alerts work for you.
SkyTruth’s new Alerts app is a year old! Or, in human terms, our new Alerts is in early childhood, a period of tremendous growth across all areas of development with occasional wobbles and stumbles.
SkyTruth Alerts show subscribers and users where environmental incidents have occurred in their Areas of Interest (AOIs), particularly for oil and gas activities. In making Alerts available to the public — at no charge — SkyTruth has provided access to tools, data and satellite imagery that environmentalists and citizen-scientists otherwise wouldn’t have. You can learn more about SkyTruth Alerts here.
In 2018, we gave Alerts a facelift and SkyTruth began looking for additional datasets that would help subscribers monitor their AOI. We’ve expanded oil and gas permitting to include West Virginia, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana and Utah. We’ve also added pollution alerts for Florida, New Mexico and New York. (If you’d like to see more datasets, let us know!)
The new Alerts was developed to meet three goals:
Provide users access to satellite imagery;
Give users the ability to create, annotate and share their own custom maps;
Enable a quicker process for adding new Alert data sources.
Whether you’re a longtime Alerts subscriber or are just starting out, here are seven features you might have missed.
1. Drawing Setback Distances Around an Alert
While Alerts incidents are generally tied to a specific point on a map, they can also greatly affect the surrounding areas. Alerts helps highlight these areas of impact by letting you define setback distances around an incident. (For example, you may get an Alert that your state government has issued a permit to drill and frack a new gas well in your AOI, and you want to create a map showing the 2500-foot zone of potential public health risk around that drilling site.)
Start by viewing the full details of an incident, either by clicking on an incident from an Alerts email, or when navigating the map by clicking an Alert icon, followed by the View Full Report link from the pop-up window.
You’ll find the Draw setbacks link at the top of the left sidebar. After clicking this link:
Select a unit of measure (meter, km, mile).
Select a distance.
Click Draw.
Repeat as necessary.
2. Navigating by Latitude/Longitude
Just like every house has its own address (house number, name of the street, city, etc), every point on the surface of earth can be specified by its own latitude and longitude coordinates. Sometimes, a latitude/longitude is all you have. Fortunately the Alerts Location Search box — located on the upper-right corner of the map — will accept these coordinates just as well as a city, state, or house address.
Try it out by on the Alerts Map by seeing where these latitude/longitude coordinates take you:
36.0986, -112.1107
30, -90
Wondering what the latitude/longitude is for where you are on the Alerts map? If you use a mouse or touchpad, Alerts will always show you the lat/lng for the current location of the pointer. You’ll find these coordinates on the right side of the heading, just under the Login link.
3. Search Alerts by Keyword and Time Period
Alerts has about 420,000 incidents in its database. The primary method for narrowing these down to the ones you’re interested in is by moving around the map, zooming in and out, and creating AOIs. You’ll always see the most recent 100 incidents on your current map.
Looking for a specific incident can seem impossible without the additional filtering that Alerts provides:
Start and end dates: Enter either or both dates. Results are shown automatically when completing each date.
Keyword: Alerts will search all incidents in the current map boundaries for the keyword you enter here. Keyword search is not case sensitive, so TAYLOR and taylor will return the same results. However, the incident must contain your typed keyword(s) with exactly the same spelling, spacing and syntax.
Click the when you’re finished typing the search keyword.
Some of the uses of this feature include searching incidents for a specific owner, address, material, well number (for oil and gas permits), or description. Also, many Alerts sources use special keywords to identify incidents. For example, we add the keyword BIGSPILL for spills over 100 gallons reported to the National Response Center, and for spills that we estimate are bigger than 100 gallons. Essentially, any words you see while viewing an incident can be used to search for similar incidents.
Some examples:
ALLEGHENY POWER
TAYLOR ENERGY
SHEEN
AMMONIA
PIPELINE
INCINERATOR
SEATTLE
063-37531
BIGSPILL
CRUDE
4. Download the Data to Analyze for yourself
Once you’ve got the map positioned just so, with the map boundaries and zoom level showing the area you’re interested in and any required filtering applied, you can take a closer look at the data and even download a CSV or KML file.
Start by clicking the Table view/Download icon, located on the Alerts tab:
You’re presented with a spreadsheet-like view of the data:
Here are some of the capabilities you’ll have:
Show top 20,000 alerts: check to show the most recent 20,000 instead of 100 incidents. [Update 8 May 2020: We’ve increased the number from 2,000 to 20000.]
Download KML File: KML files are used in an Earth browser such as Google Earth to layer the incidents visually on a map outside of Alerts.
Download CSV File: CSV files can be opened by spreadsheets or viewed in text editors.
Previous and Next buttons take you through the data, page by page.
20 rows dropdown list: allows you to change the number of incidents per page, up to 100.
Click on any column header (Id, Title, Incident Date, etc.) to sort on that column. Click again to sort in descending sequence.
Pull the vertical bars between column headings to increase/decrease the width of a column.
5. Play a Visualization of How Many Alerts Occurred Over Time
Before running this timeline, position the map with the boundaries and zoom level you want and apply any required filtering. Start by clicking the Timeline link on the Alerts tab:
Alerts will create annual counts of incidents. Try running the visualization by clicking the Play button:
From here, you’ll have controls to adjust the visualization:
Define how long each step represents (defaults to 1 year): Can select 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, or 24 months.
Define how long each step lasts (defaults to 1 second)
Select Marker plot or Heat map (defaults to Marker plot): The marker plot visualization will place a marker on the map for each alert; a heat map uses a warm-to-cool color spectrum to show where the incidents are most concentrated.
Select a date range (begin and end month/year)
Clear markers after each step, or not. If you don’t clear markers after each step, the map will represent a sum of incidents for the current step and and all prior steps.
Cluster markers, or not. For marker plots, you can cluster the incidents together instead of showing individual markers. Clustering provides a count of incidents in relative proximity to each other.
You must be logged into Alerts to use the remaining features in this post, making you a SkyTruth Alerts super-user!
6. Measure an Area on the Map
Navigate to any AOI on the map. You may want to switch to the Satellite basemap for a better view of the area. You’ll find basemap selection in the upper-middle section of the map:
Look for something you want to measure, such as a body of water, housing development, industrial complex, or agricultural field.
Start by clicking the Annotations icon , which opens the Annotations window:
There’s a lot to explore here, but for this exercise click the polygon () to start identifying the area you want to measure. You’ll find on-screen help in the Annotations window. In short, you start the measurement by clicking anywhere on the map, then use additional clicks to create new lines around the area you’re measuring. Complete the polygon by clicking the original starting point.
When finished, you’ll have these options:
By checking the Include area checkbox, Alerts will measure and display the selected area in square kilometers.
7. Share a Map Image
Create your custom map — any map! Select the alerts, basemaps, satellite imagery, layers, and annotations you want to show. When the map is ready to share, click the Share icon:
Then click the Download image of map button:
The image that’s downloaded will be a JPG file and can be found where your browser stores downloaded files. It will have a filename starting with skytruthalertsmap followed by the date and time. This is an experimental feature in Alerts and we would appreciate any feedback on its use.
Conclusion:
Alerts is becoming one of the go-to applications in an environmentalist’s toolbox. Soon, you’ll be able to create your own Issue Maps so that you can focus on the area, data, and map controls relevant to a specific topic. We also have high hopes for User Generated Alerts, planned for later in 2020, so you can show the world what’s happening in the places you care about. Stay tuned for new features in the year to come!
https://skytruth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/7things_feat.png423640Dan Cogswell/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/test_logo.pngDan Cogswell2020-02-12 11:46:022020-05-08 11:44:587 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With SkyTruth Alerts
What can a year’s worth of bilge dumping data tell us?
This is the first entry in a multi-part series revealing the significance of bilge dumping globally.
Out of sight, beyond the horizon, lies a world of activity taking place in the sea. The ocean encompasses over 70% of the globe, yet most of us only see its edges from the coasts. We’ve built many of humanity’s largest and most advanced societies along coastal regions, yet because the ocean is so remote, much of what happens there remains mysterious.
You might think of crime at sea as violence (piracy), abuse of natural resources (illegal fishing), or pollution (oil spills). However, at SkyTruth, we’ve recently focused on combating another very troubling action on the water: a serious crime known as bilge dumping. While not as well known as pollution like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, bilge dumping is a phenomenon that should not be overlooked, and yet it often is.
Bilge dumping occurs when a vessel illegally releases untreated, oily wastewater into the ocean. This wastewater, known as bilge, collects in the ship’s lower hull and needs to be emptied regularly. Since the 1970’s an international law known as MARPOL has required that bilge water be treated to remove the oil before the bilge can be legally discharged into the sea. When a vessel circumvents treatment and dumps directly into the ocean, its wastewater creates an oily slick on the water. Radar satellite imagery captures these distinctive slicks — dark and opaque — because oil smoothes the surface of the water. This dense oily slick lingers in the water until it’s broken apart by wind and wave action, dispersing toxins and globs of oil that can harm coastal communities and marine ecosystems. Vessel operators probably commit this crime as an act of convenience: to save money or time cleaning up after themselves, imposing on others the negative consequences.
SkyTruth has observed likely bilge dumping incidents around the globe many times since 2007. But in 2019, we started seeking out these incidents more systematically. We focused our daily monitoring efforts on some of the world’s major shipping lanes and on areas where we’ve found problems in the past, cataloguing every incident of bilge dumping we found through imagery. Our intent was to better understand the scope of this recurrent problem. We noted that when we went to look for oily slicks, we always found more! Unfortunately, we began to expect to see them; they were occurring somewhere within the areas we monitored almost every day. And our monitoring only covered a small part of the ocean.
In total, between January and December 2019, we found 163 slicks averaging 56 kilometers (almost 35 miles) in length. We almost always found bilge dumps using Sentinel-1 imagery: high-resolution C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite data made available by the European Space Agency. Although this imagery is sparse over the open ocean (see our blog post showing the coverage provided by these and other imaging satellites), it is collected regularly in coastal areas and provided coverage of several areas we considered likely to experience bilge dumping. Figure 1 documents each bilge dump incident we discovered, identified as red dots (note that because our monitoring was not covering the entire ocean, the lack of red dots in many areas on this map doesn’t necessarily mean those areas are free from bilge dumping).
Figure 1: Likely bilge dumping events identified by SkyTruth in 2019.
Our work suggests that bilge dumping isn’t sporadic; we repeatedly detected this illegal behavior in shipping lanes across the world, usually surrounding areas with significant energy development or active commercial ports, and often in areas with a “chokepoint” of marine traffic congestion. Bilge dumping was commonly seen in Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the Gulf of Guinea. Less frequently, but notably, we discovered it off the coast of Brazil, in the Mediterranean Sea, and in the Gulf of Mexico. In some cases, we have been able to identify the polluters, by correlating Automatic Identification System broadcasts (used to prevent collisions) from ships, with the time and location of oily slicks.
In 2020, SkyTruth is working towards automating this process so we can routinely monitor much more of the ocean. We plan to use machine learning techniques to scan available satellite imagery daily, with the hopes of identifying these slicks automatically. Near real-time detection will allow authorities and the public to respond as soon as they receive notice of the slick, meaning more perpetrators (who might still be nearby, or headed into port) can be caught, and timely actions can be taken to mitigate potential environmental harm.
Figure 2. Likely bilge dump incidents identified by SkyTruth in 2019 by region.
The next segments of this series will explore bilge dumping in more depth, including “Why should you care?” “How can this be happening?” and “What can be done about it?” We work as space detectives — investigating meticulously from above, revealing as much as we can down to the most pressing and actionable details. As we increase monitoring, automate the detection of offshore pollution with the use of machine learning, and raise public awareness, polluters will learn that they are being watched. We believe that more transparency leads to better behavior, better management, and better outcomes for Planet Earth. At SkyTruth, we are working to stop this illegal pollution by giving it the scrutiny it deserves.
Updated 5/11/20
https://skytruth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/OverallMap2019-scaled.jpeg18102560Tatianna Evanisko/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/test_logo.pngTatianna Evanisko2020-02-05 11:00:352020-05-11 16:47:10A Systematic Search for Bilge Dumping at Sea: 2019 in Review
Oil pollution at sea, mountaintop mining, Conservation Vision and more on SkyTruth’s agenda.
SkyTruth followers know that we generated a lot of momentum in 2019, laying the groundwork for major impact in 2020. Here’s a quick list of some of our most important projects underway for the new year.
Stopping oil pollution at sea: SkyTruth has tracked oil pollution at sea for years, alerting the world to the true size of the BP oil spill, tracking the ongoing leak at the Taylor Energy site until the Coast Guard agreed to take action, and flagging bilge dumping in the oceans. Bilge dumping occurs when cargo vessels and tankers illegally dump oily wastewater stored in the bottom of ships into the ocean. International law specifies how this bilge water should be treated to protect ocean ecosystems. But SkyTruth has discovered that many ships bypass costly pollution prevention equipment by simply flushing the bilge water directly into the sea.
In 2019 SkyTruth pioneered the identification of bilge dumping and the vessels responsible for this pollution by correlating satellite imagery of oily slicks with Automatic Identification System (AIS) broadcasts from ships. For the first time, we can ID the perps of this devastating and illegal practice.
Figure 1. SkyTruth identified the vessel PERKASA dumping bilge water via AIS broadcast track overlain on Sentinel-1 image.
But the Earth’s oceans are vast, and there’s only so much imagery SkyTruthers can analyze. So we’ve begun automating the detection of bilge dumping using an Artificial Intelligence (AI) technique called machine learning. With AI, SkyTruth can analyze thousands of satellite images of the world’s oceans every day –- a process we callConservation Vision — finding tiny specks on the oceans trailing distinctive oily slicks, and then naming names, so that the authorities and the public can catch and shame those skirting pollution laws when they think no one is looking.
A heads up to polluters: SkyTruth is looking.
We got a big boost last month whenAmazon Web Services (AWS) invited SkyTruth to be one of four nonprofits featured in its AWS re:Invent Hackathon for Good, and awarded SkyTruth one of seven AWS Imagine Grants. We’ll be using the funds and expertise AWS is providing to expand our reach throughout the globe and ensure polluters have nowhere to hide.
Protecting wildlife from the bad guys: Many scientists believe the Earth currently is facing anextinction crisis, with wildlife and their habitats disappearing atunprecedented rates.
But SkyTruth’s Conservation Vision program using satellite imagery and machine learning can help. Beginning in 2020, SkyTruth is partnering withWildlife Conservation Society to train computers to analyze vast quantities of image data to alert rangers and wildlife managers to threats on the ground. These threats include roads being built in protected areas, logging encroaching on important habitats, mining operations growing beyond permit boundaries, and temporary shelters hiding poachers. With better information, protected area managers can direct overstretched field patrols to specific areas and catch violators in the act, rather than arriving months after the fact. It can alert rangers before they discover a poaching camp by chance (and possibly find themselves surprised and outgunned).
To make this revolution in protected area management possible we will be building a network of technology and data partners, academic researchers, and other tech-savvy conservationists to make the algorithms, computer code, and analytical results publicly available for others to use. By publicly sharing these tools, Conservation Vision will enable others around the world to apply the same cutting-edge technologies to protecting their own areas of concern, launching a new era of wildlife and ecosystem protection. In 2020 we expect to undertake two pilot projects in different locations to develop, refine, and test Conservation Vision and ultimately transform wildlife protection around the world.
Identifying mountaintop mining companies that take the money and run. SkyTruth’sCentral Appalachia Surface Mining database has been used by researchers and advocates for years to document the disastrousenvironmental and health impacts of mountaintop mining. Now, SkyTruth is examining how well these devastated landscapes are recovering.
Figure 2. Mountaintop mine near Wise, Virginia. Copyright Alan Gignoux; Courtesy Appalachian Voices; 2014-2.
To do this, we are generating a spectral fingerprint using satellite imagery for each identified mining area. This fingerprint will outline the characteristics of each site, including the amount of bare ground present and information about vegetation regrowth. In this way we will track changes and measure recovery by comparing the sites over time to a healthy Appalachian forest.
Under federal law, mining companies are required to set aside money in bonds to make sure that funds are available to recover their sites for other uses once mining ends. But the rules are vague and vary by state. If state inspectors determine that mine sites are recovered adequately, then mining companies reclaim their bonds, even if the landscape they leave behind looks nothing like the native forest they destroyed. In some cases, old mines are safety and health hazards as well as useless eyesores, leaving communities and taxpayers to foot the bill for recovery. SkyTruth’s analysis will provide the public, and state inspectors, an objective tool for determining when sites have truly recovered and bonds should be released, or when more should be done to restore local landscapes.
Characterizing toxic algal blooms from space:Harmful algal blooms affect every coastal and Great Lakes state in the United States. Normally, algae are harmless — simple plants that form the base of aquatic food webs. But under the right conditions, algae can grow out of control causing toxic blooms that can kill wildlife and cause illness in people.
SkyTruth is partnering withresearchers at Kent State University who have developed a sophisticated technique for detecting cyanobacteria and other harmful algae in the western basin of Lake Erie — a known hotspot of harmful algal blooms. They hope to extend this work to Lake Okeechobee in Florida. But their method has limitations: It uses infrequently collected, moderate resolution 4-band multispectral satellite imagery to identify harmful blooms and the factors that facilitate their formation. SkyTruth is working to implement the Kent State approach in the more accessible Google Earth Engine cloud platform, making it much easier to generate updates to the analysis, and offering the possibility of automating the update on a regular basis. We anticipate that this tool eventually will enable scientists and coastal managers to quickly identify which algal blooms are toxic, and which are not, simply by analyzing their characteristics on imagery.
The Trump Administration is ramping up drilling on America’s public lands, threatening iconic places such as Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. Chaco Canyon is aUNESCO World Heritage Site that contains the ruins of a 1,200 year-old city that is sacred to native people. According to the Center for Western Priorities,91% of the public lands in Northwest New Mexico surrounding the Greater Chaco region are developed for oil and gas, and local communities complain of pollution, health impacts and more.
Figure 3. Chaco Canyon Chetro Ketl great kiva plaza. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.
In 2020 SkyTruth will deploy a machine learning model we developed in 2019 that identifies oil and gas drilling sites in the Rocky Mountain West with 86.3% accuracy. We will apply it to the Greater Chaco Canyon region to detect all oil and gas drilling sites on high-resolution aerial survey photography. We hope to then use these results to refine and expand the model to the wider Colorado River Basin.
Local activists in northwestern New Mexico have fought additional drilling for the past decade. Last year, New Mexico’s congressional delegation successfully led an effort to place a one-year moratorium on drilling within a 10-mile buffer around the park. Activists view this as a first step towards permanent protection. SkyTruth’s maps will help provide them with visual tools to fight for permanent protection.
A new SkyTruth website: We’ll keep you up to date about these projects and more on a new, revamped SkyTruth website under development for release later this year. Stay tuned for a new look and more great SkyTruthing in the year ahead!
https://skytruth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/team_featured_img.jpg423640Amy Mathews/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/test_logo.pngAmy Mathews2020-01-21 16:30:062020-01-22 09:42:50SkyTruth 2020: What to Expect in the New Year
A would-be diplomat discovered she could help others with technology.
Johnna Armstrong had, what she calls, a sheltered upbringing in a rural community in Upstate New York. The oldest of six children, she often had to care for her younger siblings. So when it came time for college she was anxious to learn about other cultures and find out “who I was, separate from my family,” as she puts it. She had no idea when she headed off to the State University of New York at Albany (now called the University at Albany) that ultimately she would end up in the computer field. Now, she serves as SkyTruth’s systems administrator, keeping our systems humming, the website running, and managing the rapidly evolving SkyTruth Alerts system.
Instead, in her college days, Johnna was interested in diplomacy and studied German and political science. She spent her junior and senior years in Germany and almost stayed there: After working in a German vineyard during a school break, Johnna was offered an apprenticeship when she finished school. She wanted to accept the offer but her father wouldn’t permit it. He sent her a plane ticket home and told her “you’ll be on it.”
Johnna in Germany during college.
After a temporary gig with a trade association in Washington, D.C., Johnna landed at the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) – a company that publishes legal and accounting information. She worked in the research department, fielding questions from clients about where they could get answers to various legal questions. Many of the same questions popped up repeatedly and so she made lists of the most common questions and answers. “I got very efficient,” she says, and loved the job because of the research component.
But there was no chance for advancement in her BNA position and she wanted to make a difference, ideally in the nonprofit world. So she began asking colleagues out to lunch to pick their brains about her next steps.
“What I took away from [those discussions] was that I would need either a law degree or a business degree,” she says. So she enrolled in the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona (which has campuses around the world). She completed a fast-track program for an International MBA with a capstone project on nonprofit management for Catholic Charities. The program required her to take tech courses one semester, which is where she first discovered she excelled at tech. The next semester she became a teaching assistant, helping students with technology problems. She loved it, noting “I slid sideways into tech. The whole idea of helping people really jazzes me.”
After graduation, Johnna headed to Poland with her boyfriend. It was 1991 and the Berlin Wall had just come down. “Half the school was headed to eastern Europe,” she says. “The whole culture and economy – everything was changing at a rapid pace; it was a very exciting time.” She stayed there for nine months, got two job offers that both fell through and returned to the U.S. when she ran out of money.
She landed back at BNA. But this time she had tech skills and the digital revolution had begun. She got a permanent position in BNA’s tax department, morphing print publications onto CD-roms and eventually moving them online. Her manager Pam Brophy was her mentor – and also a visionary: Pam saw the digital era on the horizon and told Johnna “this is coming; this will all be on the web. Tell me what you need [to move materials online] and I will get it for you.” Johnna learned programming on the job to make BNA’s materials accessible electronically. “It was a blast,” she says, looking back now.
And, during this period, she met her husband Paul Woods. Paul worked on the same floor. Johnna liked what she saw and asked Paul out. In typical Johnna and Paul fashion, after they got married they spent a year traveling around the world.
When they returned to reality, Johnna and Paul settled in Takoma Park – a DC suburb that kept them close to Paul’s father and Johnna’s mentor Pam, both of whom were struggling with cancer. When Pam lost her battle, “my heart went out of BNA,” Johnna says. She and Paul had started their own business, called BTS, working on web apps, web development and programming — much of it for nonprofits. And they moved to Shepherdstown, West Virginia where SkyTruth is now headquartered.
Why Shepherdstown? “I had a list,” Johnna says. Their new town had to have an independent bookstore (Shepherdstown has Four Seasons books); an independent coffee shop (Shepherdstown has had several over the years, the funkiest being the Lost Dog), and a small college or university (Shepherd University provides SkyTruth a steady stream of interns). Johnna saw these as indicators of a vibrant, diverse community. She and Paul have remained here since arriving in 2001.
Johnna with Beth O’Leary, a Global Fishing Watch research partner, in the Galapagos Islands in November 2019. Photo by Paul Woods.
Johnna first met SkyTruth President John Amos when he gave a local talk in Shepherdstown in 2004. She and Paul later got to know John better through a local group interested in promoting tech jobs in the area. Although the group eventually disbanded, John and Paul hit it off. At the time, John was SkyTruth’s only employee and he welcomed Paul’s management and tech skills. He invited Paul to join SkyTruth’s board.
During Paul’s board tenure, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drill rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and coating seabirds, marine life, and shorelines with deadly oil. John, along with SkyTruth partner Ian McDonald (a professor of oceanography at Florida State University), used satellite imagery to demonstrate that BP and government estimates of the amount of oil spewing into the Gulf were more than an order of magnitude too low. Constant news coverage propelled SkyTruth into the national spotlight and putpressure on the federal government to determine the true amount of oil damaging the Gulf ecosystem.
Johnna was impressed. She already likedSkyTruth’s origin story – how John had left an industry consulting career to bring satellite imagery to the nonprofit environmental world. With the BP disaster, she saw how SkyTruth had solved a major problem. “It was very easy to determine how much oil was really there,” she says now. “Yet the Coast Guard wasn’t doing it. That [realization] was a very powerful moment for me.”She remembers helping John with one of his many interviews during this time. “It was an interview with Al Jazeera and they wanted to do it by Skype,” she says. “But John wasn’t set up with Skype at that time, so we brought him over to our place and set him up for the interview.”
With new-found fame, SkyTruth obtained the resources to start hiring additional staff. Paul decided that instead of serving on the board, it would be more fun to work for SkyTruth. As Chief Technology Officer, Paul helped create and launch the SkyTruth, Oceana, and Google partnershipGlobal Fishing Watch (GFW), which tracks fishing vessels around the world. Johnna also worked on the GFW launch as a contractor. When GFW became an independent organization, Paul left SkyTruth’s staff and joined GFW as its Chief Innovation Officer (he now serves on SkyTruth’s board once again). Johnna had been doing contract work for SkyTruth already and, with Paul moving on, Johnna saw an opportunity to do more work with SkyTruth.
In particular, after running BTS on her own for a while, Johnna wanted more interaction with people. She enjoyed working with some high profile clients (such as Claire’s Stores in New York, Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute, and the University of California at Davis) as well as small nonprofits (including local arts groups such as the American Conservation Film Festival and the Contemporary American Theater Festival). But she was starting to feel like the only time she actually talked to people at work was when they had an emergency or problem. She really liked the people at SkyTruth and liked SkyTruth’s mission. “SkyTruth was fabulous in what it was trying to do,” she says, “putting information out there to do good, keeping data free and allowing other people to confirm or deny it.” She particularly likes SkyTruth’s environmental focus. So she approached John and SkyTruth Chief Operating Officer Jenny Allen about joining the team. They jumped at the chance.
“Johnna brings a delightfully unique set of skills and experiences to our team,” says Jenny. “She fixes pretty much anything that breaks in our systems and always has a novel work-around in her back pocket. Plus, she can knit you a pair of socks while you’re checking your mail at the post office. She’s everyone’s hero.”
And the world needs all the heroes it can get. “It’s pretty depressing out there,” Johnna notes, contemplating the global environment. “So it feels good to be doing something to help.”
https://skytruth.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/johnna_team_photo-e1578528601156.jpg200200Amy Mathews/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/test_logo.pngAmy Mathews2020-01-09 10:19:392020-01-09 15:07:31Johnna Armstrong “Slid Sideways into Tech”
SkyTruth’s goal to stop oil pollution at sea from bilge dumping is off to a strong start.
The call came two weeks in advance: SkyTruth was chosen to be one of four nonprofits featured at the AWS re:Invent Hackathon for Good held December 2, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. What followed was a frenzy of activity in the SkyTruth offices. Assembling databases for the hackathon teams to work from. Generating FAQs and documentation. Developing materials to share the SkyTruth story. Crafting just the right pitch to lure the best and brightest from a roomful of 150 computer scientists and engineers to work on our challenge — namely, automating the detection of bilge dumping at sea by vessels violating international law and polluting the ocean.
Finally, the big day arrived. Early in the morning, SkyTruthers Ry Covington, Jona Raphael, and John Amos staffed a table at Vegas’ MGM Grand, offering SkyTruth swag to entice hackers to our cause.
But cool T-shirts and stickers are one thing, and a compelling challenge is another. Here’s SkyTruth President John Amos’ pitch to the crowd: Help us stop oil pollution at sea.
The competition was tough. Three other worthy nonprofits were vying for the same brilliant brainpower that we were. After a convincing presentation and a little Q & A, SkyTruth attracted seven separate teams with a total of 35 computer scientists and engineers to work on different components of our goal: an automated system that detects bilge dumping every day around the world, identifies the perpetrators, and alerts law enforcement and the public in near real-time.
Time to roll up the sleeves and work.
And work.
And work. Eight straight hours on laptops, at flip charts, and in discussion. Lots of Red Bull to stay alert and free massages to stay limber after hours hunched over a keyboard.
Finally, at 6 p.m. it was time to present the results to the judges.
And here’s just a sample of what our teams came up with.
But that’s not the end; it’s just the beginning. We’re still evaluating all of the new material our teams generated and we’re excited about the possibilities. And the week-long AWS re:Invent conference followed the Hackathon, with lots of opportunities to make valuable contacts.
Have a little fun.
And, perhaps most importantly, win an AWS Imagine Grant to support continued work to stop illegal bilge dumping at sea. Here’s Vice President of AWS-Worldwide Public Sector, Teresa Carlson, announcing the seven Imagine Grant winners – including SkyTruth.
With the valuable contacts we made at the AWS re:Invent Hackathon and conference, the volunteers who promised to continue helping us with this project, and support from the AWS Imagine Grant and others, SkyTruth will find a way to stop illegal oil pollution at sea.
Photos by John Amos and Jona Raphael.
https://skytruth.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Jona-lends-a-hand-20191202_114855_CROP.jpg423640Amy Mathews/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/test_logo.pngAmy Mathews2019-12-19 10:05:142019-12-19 10:11:28Serious Brainpower Tackled SkyTruth Challenge at AWS re:Invent Hackathon for Good
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7 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With SkyTruth Alerts
/in Alerts, Tech Tools /by Dan CogswellSkyTruth Alerts is better than ever. Learn how to make our new Alerts work for you.
SkyTruth’s new Alerts app is a year old! Or, in human terms, our new Alerts is in early childhood, a period of tremendous growth across all areas of development with occasional wobbles and stumbles.
SkyTruth Alerts show subscribers and users where environmental incidents have occurred in their Areas of Interest (AOIs), particularly for oil and gas activities. In making Alerts available to the public — at no charge — SkyTruth has provided access to tools, data and satellite imagery that environmentalists and citizen-scientists otherwise wouldn’t have. You can learn more about SkyTruth Alerts here.
In 2018, we gave Alerts a facelift and SkyTruth began looking for additional datasets that would help subscribers monitor their AOI. We’ve expanded oil and gas permitting to include West Virginia, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana and Utah. We’ve also added pollution alerts for Florida, New Mexico and New York. (If you’d like to see more datasets, let us know!)
The new Alerts was developed to meet three goals:
Whether you’re a longtime Alerts subscriber or are just starting out, here are seven features you might have missed.
1. Drawing Setback Distances Around an Alert
While Alerts incidents are generally tied to a specific point on a map, they can also greatly affect the surrounding areas. Alerts helps highlight these areas of impact by letting you define setback distances around an incident. (For example, you may get an Alert that your state government has issued a permit to drill and frack a new gas well in your AOI, and you want to create a map showing the 2500-foot zone of potential public health risk around that drilling site.)
Start by viewing the full details of an incident, either by clicking on an incident from an Alerts email, or when navigating the map by clicking an Alert icon, followed by the View Full Report link from the pop-up window.
You’ll find the Draw setbacks link at the top of the left sidebar. After clicking this link:
2. Navigating by Latitude/Longitude
Just like every house has its own address (house number, name of the street, city, etc), every point on the surface of earth can be specified by its own latitude and longitude coordinates. Sometimes, a latitude/longitude is all you have. Fortunately the Alerts Location Search box — located on the upper-right corner of the map — will accept these coordinates just as well as a city, state, or house address.
Try it out by on the Alerts Map by seeing where these latitude/longitude coordinates take you:
Wondering what the latitude/longitude is for where you are on the Alerts map? If you use a mouse or touchpad, Alerts will always show you the lat/lng for the current location of the pointer. You’ll find these coordinates on the right side of the heading, just under the Login link.
3. Search Alerts by Keyword and Time Period
Alerts has about 420,000 incidents in its database. The primary method for narrowing these down to the ones you’re interested in is by moving around the map, zooming in and out, and creating AOIs. You’ll always see the most recent 100 incidents on your current map.
Looking for a specific incident can seem impossible without the additional filtering that Alerts provides:
Click the
when you’re finished typing the search keyword.
Some of the uses of this feature include searching incidents for a specific owner, address, material, well number (for oil and gas permits), or description. Also, many Alerts sources use special keywords to identify incidents. For example, we add the keyword BIGSPILL for spills over 100 gallons reported to the National Response Center, and for spills that we estimate are bigger than 100 gallons. Essentially, any words you see while viewing an incident can be used to search for similar incidents.
Some examples:
4. Download the Data to Analyze for yourself
Once you’ve got the map positioned just so, with the map boundaries and zoom level showing the area you’re interested in and any required filtering applied, you can take a closer look at the data and even download a CSV or KML file.
Start by clicking the Table view/Download icon, located on the Alerts tab:
You’re presented with a spreadsheet-like view of the data:
Here are some of the capabilities you’ll have:
5. Play a Visualization of How Many Alerts Occurred Over Time
Before running this timeline, position the map with the boundaries and zoom level you want and apply any required filtering. Start by clicking the Timeline link on the Alerts tab:
Alerts will create annual counts of incidents. Try running the visualization by clicking the Play button:
From here, you’ll have controls to adjust the visualization:
You must be logged into Alerts to use the remaining features in this post, making you a SkyTruth Alerts super-user!
6. Measure an Area on the Map
Navigate to any AOI on the map. You may want to switch to the Satellite basemap for a better view of the area. You’ll find basemap selection in the upper-middle section of the map:
Look for something you want to measure, such as a body of water, housing development, industrial complex, or agricultural field.
Start by clicking the Annotations icon
, which opens the Annotations window:
There’s a lot to explore here, but for this exercise click the polygon (
) to start identifying the area you want to measure. You’ll find on-screen help in the Annotations window. In short, you start the measurement by clicking anywhere on the map, then use additional clicks to create new lines around the area you’re measuring. Complete the polygon by clicking the original starting point.
When finished, you’ll have these options:
By checking the Include area checkbox, Alerts will measure and display the selected area in square kilometers.
7. Share a Map Image
Create your custom map — any map! Select the alerts, basemaps, satellite imagery, layers, and annotations you want to show. When the map is ready to share, click the Share icon:
Then click the Download image of map button:
The image that’s downloaded will be a JPG file and can be found where your browser stores downloaded files. It will have a filename starting with skytruthalertsmap followed by the date and time. This is an experimental feature in Alerts and we would appreciate any feedback on its use.
Conclusion:
Alerts is becoming one of the go-to applications in an environmentalist’s toolbox. Soon, you’ll be able to create your own Issue Maps so that you can focus on the area, data, and map controls relevant to a specific topic. We also have high hopes for User Generated Alerts, planned for later in 2020, so you can show the world what’s happening in the places you care about. Stay tuned for new features in the year to come!
A Systematic Search for Bilge Dumping at Sea: 2019 in Review
/in Bilge Dumping, See it, Change it /by Tatianna EvaniskoWhat can a year’s worth of bilge dumping data tell us?
This is the first entry in a multi-part series revealing the significance of bilge dumping globally.
Out of sight, beyond the horizon, lies a world of activity taking place in the sea. The ocean encompasses over 70% of the globe, yet most of us only see its edges from the coasts. We’ve built many of humanity’s largest and most advanced societies along coastal regions, yet because the ocean is so remote, much of what happens there remains mysterious.
You might think of crime at sea as violence (piracy), abuse of natural resources (illegal fishing), or pollution (oil spills). However, at SkyTruth, we’ve recently focused on combating another very troubling action on the water: a serious crime known as bilge dumping. While not as well known as pollution like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, bilge dumping is a phenomenon that should not be overlooked, and yet it often is.
Bilge dumping occurs when a vessel illegally releases untreated, oily wastewater into the ocean. This wastewater, known as bilge, collects in the ship’s lower hull and needs to be emptied regularly. Since the 1970’s an international law known as MARPOL has required that bilge water be treated to remove the oil before the bilge can be legally discharged into the sea. When a vessel circumvents treatment and dumps directly into the ocean, its wastewater creates an oily slick on the water. Radar satellite imagery captures these distinctive slicks — dark and opaque — because oil smoothes the surface of the water. This dense oily slick lingers in the water until it’s broken apart by wind and wave action, dispersing toxins and globs of oil that can harm coastal communities and marine ecosystems. Vessel operators probably commit this crime as an act of convenience: to save money or time cleaning up after themselves, imposing on others the negative consequences.
SkyTruth has observed likely bilge dumping incidents around the globe many times since 2007. But in 2019, we started seeking out these incidents more systematically. We focused our daily monitoring efforts on some of the world’s major shipping lanes and on areas where we’ve found problems in the past, cataloguing every incident of bilge dumping we found through imagery. Our intent was to better understand the scope of this recurrent problem. We noted that when we went to look for oily slicks, we always found more! Unfortunately, we began to expect to see them; they were occurring somewhere within the areas we monitored almost every day. And our monitoring only covered a small part of the ocean.
In total, between January and December 2019, we found 163 slicks averaging 56 kilometers (almost 35 miles) in length. We almost always found bilge dumps using Sentinel-1 imagery: high-resolution C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite data made available by the European Space Agency. Although this imagery is sparse over the open ocean (see our blog post showing the coverage provided by these and other imaging satellites), it is collected regularly in coastal areas and provided coverage of several areas we considered likely to experience bilge dumping. Figure 1 documents each bilge dump incident we discovered, identified as red dots (note that because our monitoring was not covering the entire ocean, the lack of red dots in many areas on this map doesn’t necessarily mean those areas are free from bilge dumping).
Figure 1: Likely bilge dumping events identified by SkyTruth in 2019.
Our work suggests that bilge dumping isn’t sporadic; we repeatedly detected this illegal behavior in shipping lanes across the world, usually surrounding areas with significant energy development or active commercial ports, and often in areas with a “chokepoint” of marine traffic congestion. Bilge dumping was commonly seen in Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the Gulf of Guinea. Less frequently, but notably, we discovered it off the coast of Brazil, in the Mediterranean Sea, and in the Gulf of Mexico. In some cases, we have been able to identify the polluters, by correlating Automatic Identification System broadcasts (used to prevent collisions) from ships, with the time and location of oily slicks.
In 2020, SkyTruth is working towards automating this process so we can routinely monitor much more of the ocean. We plan to use machine learning techniques to scan available satellite imagery daily, with the hopes of identifying these slicks automatically. Near real-time detection will allow authorities and the public to respond as soon as they receive notice of the slick, meaning more perpetrators (who might still be nearby, or headed into port) can be caught, and timely actions can be taken to mitigate potential environmental harm.
Figure 2. Likely bilge dump incidents identified by SkyTruth in 2019 by region.
The next segments of this series will explore bilge dumping in more depth, including “Why should you care?” “How can this be happening?” and “What can be done about it?” We work as space detectives — investigating meticulously from above, revealing as much as we can down to the most pressing and actionable details. As we increase monitoring, automate the detection of offshore pollution with the use of machine learning, and raise public awareness, polluters will learn that they are being watched. We believe that more transparency leads to better behavior, better management, and better outcomes for Planet Earth. At SkyTruth, we are working to stop this illegal pollution by giving it the scrutiny it deserves.
Updated 5/11/20
SkyTruth 2020: What to Expect in the New Year
/in Bilge Dumping, Conservation Vision, Hydraulic Fracturing, Mining, Oil & Gas, Public Lands, See it, Change it /by Amy MathewsOil pollution at sea, mountaintop mining, Conservation Vision and more on SkyTruth’s agenda.
SkyTruth followers know that we generated a lot of momentum in 2019, laying the groundwork for major impact in 2020. Here’s a quick list of some of our most important projects underway for the new year.
Stopping oil pollution at sea: SkyTruth has tracked oil pollution at sea for years, alerting the world to the true size of the BP oil spill, tracking the ongoing leak at the Taylor Energy site until the Coast Guard agreed to take action, and flagging bilge dumping in the oceans. Bilge dumping occurs when cargo vessels and tankers illegally dump oily wastewater stored in the bottom of ships into the ocean. International law specifies how this bilge water should be treated to protect ocean ecosystems. But SkyTruth has discovered that many ships bypass costly pollution prevention equipment by simply flushing the bilge water directly into the sea.
In 2019 SkyTruth pioneered the identification of bilge dumping and the vessels responsible for this pollution by correlating satellite imagery of oily slicks with Automatic Identification System (AIS) broadcasts from ships. For the first time, we can ID the perps of this devastating and illegal practice.
Figure 1. SkyTruth identified the vessel PERKASA dumping bilge water via AIS broadcast track overlain on Sentinel-1 image.
But the Earth’s oceans are vast, and there’s only so much imagery SkyTruthers can analyze. So we’ve begun automating the detection of bilge dumping using an Artificial Intelligence (AI) technique called machine learning. With AI, SkyTruth can analyze thousands of satellite images of the world’s oceans every day –- a process we call Conservation Vision — finding tiny specks on the oceans trailing distinctive oily slicks, and then naming names, so that the authorities and the public can catch and shame those skirting pollution laws when they think no one is looking.
A heads up to polluters: SkyTruth is looking.
We got a big boost last month when Amazon Web Services (AWS) invited SkyTruth to be one of four nonprofits featured in its AWS re:Invent Hackathon for Good, and awarded SkyTruth one of seven AWS Imagine Grants. We’ll be using the funds and expertise AWS is providing to expand our reach throughout the globe and ensure polluters have nowhere to hide.
Protecting wildlife from the bad guys: Many scientists believe the Earth currently is facing an extinction crisis, with wildlife and their habitats disappearing at unprecedented rates.
But SkyTruth’s Conservation Vision program using satellite imagery and machine learning can help. Beginning in 2020, SkyTruth is partnering with Wildlife Conservation Society to train computers to analyze vast quantities of image data to alert rangers and wildlife managers to threats on the ground. These threats include roads being built in protected areas, logging encroaching on important habitats, mining operations growing beyond permit boundaries, and temporary shelters hiding poachers. With better information, protected area managers can direct overstretched field patrols to specific areas and catch violators in the act, rather than arriving months after the fact. It can alert rangers before they discover a poaching camp by chance (and possibly find themselves surprised and outgunned).
To make this revolution in protected area management possible we will be building a network of technology and data partners, academic researchers, and other tech-savvy conservationists to make the algorithms, computer code, and analytical results publicly available for others to use. By publicly sharing these tools, Conservation Vision will enable others around the world to apply the same cutting-edge technologies to protecting their own areas of concern, launching a new era of wildlife and ecosystem protection. In 2020 we expect to undertake two pilot projects in different locations to develop, refine, and test Conservation Vision and ultimately transform wildlife protection around the world.
Identifying mountaintop mining companies that take the money and run. SkyTruth’s Central Appalachia Surface Mining database has been used by researchers and advocates for years to document the disastrous environmental and health impacts of mountaintop mining. Now, SkyTruth is examining how well these devastated landscapes are recovering.
Figure 2. Mountaintop mine near Wise, Virginia. Copyright Alan Gignoux; Courtesy Appalachian Voices; 2014-2.
To do this, we are generating a spectral fingerprint using satellite imagery for each identified mining area. This fingerprint will outline the characteristics of each site, including the amount of bare ground present and information about vegetation regrowth. In this way we will track changes and measure recovery by comparing the sites over time to a healthy Appalachian forest.
Under federal law, mining companies are required to set aside money in bonds to make sure that funds are available to recover their sites for other uses once mining ends. But the rules are vague and vary by state. If state inspectors determine that mine sites are recovered adequately, then mining companies reclaim their bonds, even if the landscape they leave behind looks nothing like the native forest they destroyed. In some cases, old mines are safety and health hazards as well as useless eyesores, leaving communities and taxpayers to foot the bill for recovery. SkyTruth’s analysis will provide the public, and state inspectors, an objective tool for determining when sites have truly recovered and bonds should be released, or when more should be done to restore local landscapes.
Characterizing toxic algal blooms from space: Harmful algal blooms affect every coastal and Great Lakes state in the United States. Normally, algae are harmless — simple plants that form the base of aquatic food webs. But under the right conditions, algae can grow out of control causing toxic blooms that can kill wildlife and cause illness in people.
SkyTruth is partnering with researchers at Kent State University who have developed a sophisticated technique for detecting cyanobacteria and other harmful algae in the western basin of Lake Erie — a known hotspot of harmful algal blooms. They hope to extend this work to Lake Okeechobee in Florida. But their method has limitations: It uses infrequently collected, moderate resolution 4-band multispectral satellite imagery to identify harmful blooms and the factors that facilitate their formation. SkyTruth is working to implement the Kent State approach in the more accessible Google Earth Engine cloud platform, making it much easier to generate updates to the analysis, and offering the possibility of automating the update on a regular basis. We anticipate that this tool eventually will enable scientists and coastal managers to quickly identify which algal blooms are toxic, and which are not, simply by analyzing their characteristics on imagery.
Revealing the extent of fossil fuel drilling on public lands in the Colorado River Basin: Modern oil and gas drilling and fracking is a threat to public health, biodiversity and the climate. For example, researchers from Johns Hopkins University used our data on oil and gas infrastructure in Pennsylvania to examine the health effects on people living near these sites and found higher premature birth rates for mothers in Pennsylvania that live near fracking sites as well as increased asthma attacks.
The Trump Administration is ramping up drilling on America’s public lands, threatening iconic places such as Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. Chaco Canyon is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that contains the ruins of a 1,200 year-old city that is sacred to native people. According to the Center for Western Priorities, 91% of the public lands in Northwest New Mexico surrounding the Greater Chaco region are developed for oil and gas, and local communities complain of pollution, health impacts and more.
Figure 3. Chaco Canyon Chetro Ketl great kiva plaza. Photo courtesy of the National Park Service.
In 2020 SkyTruth will deploy a machine learning model we developed in 2019 that identifies oil and gas drilling sites in the Rocky Mountain West with 86.3% accuracy. We will apply it to the Greater Chaco Canyon region to detect all oil and gas drilling sites on high-resolution aerial survey photography. We hope to then use these results to refine and expand the model to the wider Colorado River Basin.
Local activists in northwestern New Mexico have fought additional drilling for the past decade. Last year, New Mexico’s congressional delegation successfully led an effort to place a one-year moratorium on drilling within a 10-mile buffer around the park. Activists view this as a first step towards permanent protection. SkyTruth’s maps will help provide them with visual tools to fight for permanent protection.
A new SkyTruth website: We’ll keep you up to date about these projects and more on a new, revamped SkyTruth website under development for release later this year. Stay tuned for a new look and more great SkyTruthing in the year ahead!
Johnna Armstrong “Slid Sideways into Tech”
/in SkyTruth Spotlight /by Amy MathewsA would-be diplomat discovered she could help others with technology.
Johnna Armstrong had, what she calls, a sheltered upbringing in a rural community in Upstate New York. The oldest of six children, she often had to care for her younger siblings. So when it came time for college she was anxious to learn about other cultures and find out “who I was, separate from my family,” as she puts it. She had no idea when she headed off to the State University of New York at Albany (now called the University at Albany) that ultimately she would end up in the computer field. Now, she serves as SkyTruth’s systems administrator, keeping our systems humming, the website running, and managing the rapidly evolving SkyTruth Alerts system.
Instead, in her college days, Johnna was interested in diplomacy and studied German and political science. She spent her junior and senior years in Germany and almost stayed there: After working in a German vineyard during a school break, Johnna was offered an apprenticeship when she finished school. She wanted to accept the offer but her father wouldn’t permit it. He sent her a plane ticket home and told her “you’ll be on it.”
Johnna in Germany during college.
After a temporary gig with a trade association in Washington, D.C., Johnna landed at the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) – a company that publishes legal and accounting information. She worked in the research department, fielding questions from clients about where they could get answers to various legal questions. Many of the same questions popped up repeatedly and so she made lists of the most common questions and answers. “I got very efficient,” she says, and loved the job because of the research component.
But there was no chance for advancement in her BNA position and she wanted to make a difference, ideally in the nonprofit world. So she began asking colleagues out to lunch to pick their brains about her next steps.
“What I took away from [those discussions] was that I would need either a law degree or a business degree,” she says. So she enrolled in the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona (which has campuses around the world). She completed a fast-track program for an International MBA with a capstone project on nonprofit management for Catholic Charities. The program required her to take tech courses one semester, which is where she first discovered she excelled at tech. The next semester she became a teaching assistant, helping students with technology problems. She loved it, noting “I slid sideways into tech. The whole idea of helping people really jazzes me.”
After graduation, Johnna headed to Poland with her boyfriend. It was 1991 and the Berlin Wall had just come down. “Half the school was headed to eastern Europe,” she says. “The whole culture and economy – everything was changing at a rapid pace; it was a very exciting time.” She stayed there for nine months, got two job offers that both fell through and returned to the U.S. when she ran out of money.
She landed back at BNA. But this time she had tech skills and the digital revolution had begun. She got a permanent position in BNA’s tax department, morphing print publications onto CD-roms and eventually moving them online. Her manager Pam Brophy was her mentor – and also a visionary: Pam saw the digital era on the horizon and told Johnna “this is coming; this will all be on the web. Tell me what you need [to move materials online] and I will get it for you.” Johnna learned programming on the job to make BNA’s materials accessible electronically. “It was a blast,” she says, looking back now.
And, during this period, she met her husband Paul Woods. Paul worked on the same floor. Johnna liked what she saw and asked Paul out. In typical Johnna and Paul fashion, after they got married they spent a year traveling around the world.
When they returned to reality, Johnna and Paul settled in Takoma Park – a DC suburb that kept them close to Paul’s father and Johnna’s mentor Pam, both of whom were struggling with cancer. When Pam lost her battle, “my heart went out of BNA,” Johnna says. She and Paul had started their own business, called BTS, working on web apps, web development and programming — much of it for nonprofits. And they moved to Shepherdstown, West Virginia where SkyTruth is now headquartered.
Why Shepherdstown? “I had a list,” Johnna says. Their new town had to have an independent bookstore (Shepherdstown has Four Seasons books); an independent coffee shop (Shepherdstown has had several over the years, the funkiest being the Lost Dog), and a small college or university (Shepherd University provides SkyTruth a steady stream of interns). Johnna saw these as indicators of a vibrant, diverse community. She and Paul have remained here since arriving in 2001.
Johnna with Beth O’Leary, a Global Fishing Watch research partner, in the Galapagos Islands in November 2019. Photo by Paul Woods.
Johnna first met SkyTruth President John Amos when he gave a local talk in Shepherdstown in 2004. She and Paul later got to know John better through a local group interested in promoting tech jobs in the area. Although the group eventually disbanded, John and Paul hit it off. At the time, John was SkyTruth’s only employee and he welcomed Paul’s management and tech skills. He invited Paul to join SkyTruth’s board.
During Paul’s board tenure, BP’s Deepwater Horizon drill rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and coating seabirds, marine life, and shorelines with deadly oil. John, along with SkyTruth partner Ian McDonald (a professor of oceanography at Florida State University), used satellite imagery to demonstrate that BP and government estimates of the amount of oil spewing into the Gulf were more than an order of magnitude too low. Constant news coverage propelled SkyTruth into the national spotlight and put pressure on the federal government to determine the true amount of oil damaging the Gulf ecosystem.
Johnna was impressed. She already liked SkyTruth’s origin story – how John had left an industry consulting career to bring satellite imagery to the nonprofit environmental world. With the BP disaster, she saw how SkyTruth had solved a major problem. “It was very easy to determine how much oil was really there,” she says now. “Yet the Coast Guard wasn’t doing it. That [realization] was a very powerful moment for me.” She remembers helping John with one of his many interviews during this time. “It was an interview with Al Jazeera and they wanted to do it by Skype,” she says. “But John wasn’t set up with Skype at that time, so we brought him over to our place and set him up for the interview.”
With new-found fame, SkyTruth obtained the resources to start hiring additional staff. Paul decided that instead of serving on the board, it would be more fun to work for SkyTruth. As Chief Technology Officer, Paul helped create and launch the SkyTruth, Oceana, and Google partnership Global Fishing Watch (GFW), which tracks fishing vessels around the world. Johnna also worked on the GFW launch as a contractor. When GFW became an independent organization, Paul left SkyTruth’s staff and joined GFW as its Chief Innovation Officer (he now serves on SkyTruth’s board once again). Johnna had been doing contract work for SkyTruth already and, with Paul moving on, Johnna saw an opportunity to do more work with SkyTruth.
In particular, after running BTS on her own for a while, Johnna wanted more interaction with people. She enjoyed working with some high profile clients (such as Claire’s Stores in New York, Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute, and the University of California at Davis) as well as small nonprofits (including local arts groups such as the American Conservation Film Festival and the Contemporary American Theater Festival). But she was starting to feel like the only time she actually talked to people at work was when they had an emergency or problem. She really liked the people at SkyTruth and liked SkyTruth’s mission. “SkyTruth was fabulous in what it was trying to do,” she says, “putting information out there to do good, keeping data free and allowing other people to confirm or deny it.” She particularly likes SkyTruth’s environmental focus. So she approached John and SkyTruth Chief Operating Officer Jenny Allen about joining the team. They jumped at the chance.
“Johnna brings a delightfully unique set of skills and experiences to our team,” says Jenny. “She fixes pretty much anything that breaks in our systems and always has a novel work-around in her back pocket. Plus, she can knit you a pair of socks while you’re checking your mail at the post office. She’s everyone’s hero.”
And the world needs all the heroes it can get. “It’s pretty depressing out there,” Johnna notes, contemplating the global environment. “So it feels good to be doing something to help.”
Serious Brainpower Tackled SkyTruth Challenge at AWS re:Invent Hackathon for Good
/in Bilge Dumping, Tech Tools /by Amy MathewsSkyTruth’s goal to stop oil pollution at sea from bilge dumping is off to a strong start.
The call came two weeks in advance: SkyTruth was chosen to be one of four nonprofits featured at the AWS re:Invent Hackathon for Good held December 2, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. What followed was a frenzy of activity in the SkyTruth offices. Assembling databases for the hackathon teams to work from. Generating FAQs and documentation. Developing materials to share the SkyTruth story. Crafting just the right pitch to lure the best and brightest from a roomful of 150 computer scientists and engineers to work on our challenge — namely, automating the detection of bilge dumping at sea by vessels violating international law and polluting the ocean.
Finally, the big day arrived. Early in the morning, SkyTruthers Ry Covington, Jona Raphael, and John Amos staffed a table at Vegas’ MGM Grand, offering SkyTruth swag to entice hackers to our cause.
But cool T-shirts and stickers are one thing, and a compelling challenge is another. Here’s SkyTruth President John Amos’ pitch to the crowd: Help us stop oil pollution at sea.
The competition was tough. Three other worthy nonprofits were vying for the same brilliant brainpower that we were. After a convincing presentation and a little Q & A, SkyTruth attracted seven separate teams with a total of 35 computer scientists and engineers to work on different components of our goal: an automated system that detects bilge dumping every day around the world, identifies the perpetrators, and alerts law enforcement and the public in near real-time.
Time to roll up the sleeves and work.
And work.
And work. Eight straight hours on laptops, at flip charts, and in discussion. Lots of Red Bull to stay alert and free massages to stay limber after hours hunched over a keyboard.
Finally, at 6 p.m. it was time to present the results to the judges.
And here’s just a sample of what our teams came up with.
But that’s not the end; it’s just the beginning. We’re still evaluating all of the new material our teams generated and we’re excited about the possibilities. And the week-long AWS re:Invent conference followed the Hackathon, with lots of opportunities to make valuable contacts.
Have a little fun.
And, perhaps most importantly, win an AWS Imagine Grant to support continued work to stop illegal bilge dumping at sea. Here’s Vice President of AWS-Worldwide Public Sector, Teresa Carlson, announcing the seven Imagine Grant winners – including SkyTruth.
With the valuable contacts we made at the AWS re:Invent Hackathon and conference, the volunteers who promised to continue helping us with this project, and support from the AWS Imagine Grant and others, SkyTruth will find a way to stop illegal oil pollution at sea.
Photos by John Amos and Jona Raphael.