GRAVITY 02 SOLUTIONS
Aquaculture Stewardship Council
How can we remotely automate the identification of shrimp ponds within a farm boundary, and categorise their production and quality status?
Innovator:
Sea Warden and Think Aqua
Solution:
Advancing the sustainability of farmed seafood with remote monitoring technology
Description:
Certification programs are crucial tools for addressing the social and environmental impacts related to the farming of seafood - the source of half of all seafood produced globally. Our remote monitoring technology powered by satellite observations and farmer-submitted data will enable certification programs to be accessible to more farmers by supporting area-based assessments, and support the next generation of blockchain-based traceability systems. Beyond certification, our solution improves farmer access to the insights, capital, and insurance products they need to grow sustainably. In early 2021, Sea Warden and ThinkAqua will be piloting “remote monitoring as a service” with the Aquaculture Stewardship Council. Sea Warden (based in the US) will provide the remote monitoring technology, while ThinkAqua (based in the UK) will provide the experience of working with small scale SE Asian aquaculture farmers.
Bardsley England (1)
Starting with orchard systems, how does one remotely measure and monitor carbon accurately?
Innovator:
Solution:
UAV-Satellite Solution for Accurate Orchard Carbon Measurement and Monitoring
Description:
Existing tree carbon quantification and monitoring methods rely upon manual tape measurements, allometric growth equations, and significant extrapolation. These techniques are inaccurate and designed for use in conventional forestry: they are inappropriate for orchard environments. To support Bardsley in understanding its orchard carbon stocks, Treeconomy proposed a combined UAV-satellite measuring and monitoring solution, offering high spatial and temporal resolution. This novel integration of established technologies will offer low-cost, high-precision carbon estimates, facilitating tree-level understanding for growers and future voluntary carbon market access for agroforestry and tree crop projects.
Bardsley England (2)
How can we bridge the link between regional weather measures (and forecasts) and local microclimates – starting with agricultural orchard systems?
(1) Innovator:
Solution:
Horticulture Agriculture Viticulture Microclimate Assistant Toolkit Environment (HAVMATE),
Description:
Extreme localised weather events such as frost, hail, and sun damage can cost food growers millions of dollars each year due to reduced yields. Current solutions present information only from sensors and highly infrastructure dependent. Horticulture Agriculture Viticulture Microclimate Assistant Toolkit Environment (HAVMATE), is the Frazer-Nash developed solution to identify localised weather patterns and provide growers with risk-based guidance to inform the mitigation strategies. HAVMATE uses intelligent data analysis to provide high spatial resolution climate data, visualizations, and integrated advanced decision support that is tailored to customer needs in an easy-to-use, consumer friendly package. HAVMATE provides this support via a highly portable, cross platform, cloud-based solution without the need for expensive permanent sensor installations on site.
(2) Innovator:
Solution:
Creating Hyperlocal micro-climate models
Description:
The solution builds on the existing Hyperlocal Rainfall and Solar models developed by Meniscus using their Meniscus Analytics Platform (MAP). This is a cloud-based analytics platform for deploying large scale Internet of Things applications that require high volume/high speed analytics. MAP Rain uses the latest radar rainfall data to predict the path of rainfall for the next hour (Hyperlocal Rainfall). MAP Solar uses near real-time satellite imagery to predict the path of clouds and hence solar irradiance at any location.
The solution will combine additional weather feeds with MAP Rain and MAP Solar and apply machine learning to create micro-climate models for any point or any polygon. Using the existing weather station data allows us to ground truth the model outputs with actual results.
Marine Stewardship Council
Can we remotely and independently monitor and verify spatial compliance to sustainable fishing practices, and create an affordable, accessible solution for small scale fishers?
(1) Innovator:
Solution:
FisherSpotter
Description:
FisherSpotter combines three existing technologies to create a robust and established system for monitoring hard to track assets. Through leveraging purpose-built technology from livestock, marine research, and recreational boating, our team is developing a viable solution for tracking artisanal fisheries that costs less than 1% of the smallest scale fishery’s annual revenue. The result is a product that grows the sustainable fishing industry, while enhancing safety in fishing communities.
(2) Innovator:
Solution:
VAL Fishing Compliance System
Description:
Our solution uses innovative authentication techniques to reduce cost and power consumption, lowering the barrier of entry for ethical and certified fishing - particularly in developing countries. It also includes advanced safety systems to help reduce deaths at sea as well as incentivising ethical fishing.
NT Health
How can space technologies assist in providing safety and security to people working in remote locations?
Innovator:
Solution:
EyeSIM
Description:
EyeSIM is an automatic alert system consisting of two complimentary solution streams that keep the remote health workers connected and supported via satellite telecommunications. One stream focuses on the health workers and their personal state. The other stream focuses on the vehicle’s state and location. This system integrates and combines reliable personal health level and vehicle monitoring, communications, duress activation, and situational awareness of the vehicles through an end-to-end solution for the remote workforce – offering significant safety/security benefits.
SA Water (1)
How can we identify underground water leaks in a timely manner to generate automated workflows to assess damage and impacts to customers and water loss?
Innovator:
Solution:
Asset management, inspection and failure detection from space
Description:
Spotttitt is working with SA Water in trialing earth observation satellites to help the utility improve its management and monitoring of more than 27,000 kilometres of water main across South Australia.
Imagery and data collected using the technology aims to identify changes in vegetation over time near SA Water infrastructure – particularly in regional and remote areas – potentially indicating an ongoing pipe leak, that may have otherwise gone unnoticed for an extended period of time.
The satellites will also monitor vegetation growth, to enable a better understanding of any bushfire risk on SA Water land, to then plan subsequent mitigation work, ensuring the safety and protection of the assets and surrounding community.
SA Water (2)
How can we optimise water use and improve irrigation management using datasets and communicate this information to our customers to change behaviour and promote smart water use?
Innovator:
Solution:
Empowering SA Water customers to be waterwise
Description:
To drive change in SA Water residential customers’ behaviour, Waterwise has developed a mobile app that communicates to SA residents the best times to water their lawns and gardens to ensure that water is used wisely. The app is driven by data, including historical and forecast weather data, satellite imagery and residential user inputs such as their method of irrigation, soil type and vegetation information. With increasing urban heat stress, the need to use water wisely is more pressing than ever. The app will inform users when to water to reduce the heat surrounding their homes, reducing electricity use from air conditioners, as well as how much to water to ensure that water is used efficiently. This will ensure South Australians maintain their green spaces and lower their utility costs all while keeping cool in summer, enabling the optimisation of water management, and paving the way to a smart and livable city.
Sydney Water
How can we rethink the current linear water economy into a sustainable circular economy, embracing digital innovation and environment advancement?
Innovator:
Solution:
Cleaner Waterways
Description:
Sydney Water would like to maximise the use and recovery of natural resources by managing nutrient levels and regenerating waterways. The Arup and IBM team proposed to help solve this problem by using satellite and drone imagery, augmented by AI and ML, to identify issues for early intervention as well as informing water quality modelling and waterway health improvement program.
The positive outcomes include reduced costs of on-ground surveys, reduced labour cost in analysing results, reduced risk of fines and the cost of clean-up and potential revenue streams from customer willingness to pay.
This project will help Sydney Water to position as a leader in providing liveability and amenity to customers and improving environmental value of waterway assets.
OZ Minerals
How can we use innovative technologies to visualise and trace products and their social and environmental characteristics within our global supply network?
*Details coming soon
Commission on Excellence and Innovation in Health
How can we use geospatial data to identify the outbreak of diseases as soon as they occur to prepare an appropriate response?
Innovator:
Solution:
Pandemic Early Warning System
Description:
Geospatial Intelligence Pty Ltd (GI)’s solution is based on a multitude of data feeds and AI/ML. The Challenge was compared to a “chain” a Pandemic Chain where different technologies could be utilised to break the links in a Pandemic Chain. Our solution aims to make the identification of a new disease outbreak a much faster process, anywhere in the world. Early identification of a new outbreak allows authorities to have more time to prepare and respond.
GI utilises Open Source Intelligence in collaboration with Big Data, thematic geospatial layers, proprietary Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms and link analysis software to generate relationships between a range of different data sources. Data collected and deciphered by GI can be used to track disease hotspots and identify entry points. GI are also able to perform network analysis and pattern detection to identify localised hotspots and transmission routes.
UK Hydrographic Office
How can we create a way for local and national authorities to track coverage and carbon storage of mangroves and seagrass, to verify their health status and open the door for carbon trading?
(1) Innovator:
Solution:
Monitoring Blue Carbon with Geobotanics
Description:
A cutting-edge platform for monitoring blue carbon and faciitating Payment for Ecosystem Services. The system leverages Mantle Labs' revolutionary cloud removal AI capabilities to provide a seamless daily view of ecosystems such as tropical mangroves; monitoring factors such as acreage and plant health in high resolution and near real time.
(2) Innovator:
Solution:
Emapper – a multi-source data platform for ecological monitoring and restoration
Description:
Ecocene’s solution used freely-available satellite imagery from the European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-2 missions in addition to advanced bio-climatic modelling techniques to deliver comprehensive mangrove and sea-grass datasets and advanced monitoring of both condition and extent over time. Access the data was enabled through the Emapper online spatial data platform which allowed users to produce automated reports and visualisations of both current and previous condition and extent.
(3) Innovator:
Solution:
Remote Sensing Methodology for Blue Carbon
Description:
The role of nature-based solutions (NBS) to mitigating climate change is becoming increasingly clear. Mangroves and seagrass are recognised as the lowest-cost method for such action, especially when their adaptation value is included (10:1 benefit cost ratio, Global Adaptation Commission). However, for such action to be done efficiently much better monitoring of mangrove biomass and carbon storage over time is needed to ensure transparency and accuracy.
The solution proposed by Treeconomy, in partnership with Vlinder, is to combine UAV-borne LiDAR scanning to provide a precise biomass baseline measurement. This serves as high-quality and site-specific training data to develop custom algorithms for satellite carbon stock monitoring, allowing for a scalable approach to carbon stock calculation over time. This method provides a more accurate assessment of stored CO2 compared to manual on-the-ground data from tape measurements. The high density point-cloud from the UAV assessment provides a flexible data source for additional analysis.