Integration of Blue Cloud services on the “Wildlife Tracker for Oceans”
Success story with the “Galapagos Whale Shark Project”
Introduction
This post is a summary of the online event held in July 2022 related to the implementation of Blue Cloud services in the “Wildlife Tracker v0.3”. You can find the event recorded here:
What is the Wildlife Tracker?
“Wildlife Tracker” is a geo-framework dedicated to wildlife conservation that is being developed under GIS4 wildlife movement analytics. The platform offers a unique analysis of animal tracking overlaid with eco-geographical data layers to visually observe in near real-time what may be influencing the animal activities and to spatially assess their meaningful habitats.
Through the study of animal movement analytics and their meaningful spots (foraging areas, migration routes, etc.) as well as environmental impacts on their activities, “Wildlife Tracker” brings in the marine conservation and spatial planning values that support more effective MPAs demarcation and better government of wildlife protection. The “Wildlife Tracker” aims to become a data-driven source for scientific research on biodiversity conservation, marine spatial planning, and decision-making institutions on MPAs assessment and expanded delimitation.
Blue Cloud Services
Blue Cloud is a collaborative virtual environment and data provider for open ocean science. The Blue Cloud platform facilitates a smart federation of multidisciplinary European marine research data infrastructures (SeaDataNet, EurOBIS, Euro-ARGO, ICOS, SOCAT, ENA, EMODnet, CMEMS) and e-Infrastructures (EUDAT, D4Science, WEkEO DIAS) that allows researchers to combine, reuse, and share quality ocean data across disciplines and countries to explore ocean science and foster blue economy growth.
The Blue Cloud data services are developed into five dedicated demonstrators and can be accessed in Virtual Labs to unlock the ocean monitoring data and research potential. Virtual labs are:
- Biodiversity → Zoo- and Phytoplankton EOV products
- Genomics → Plankton Genomics
- Environment → Marine Environmental Indicators
- Fisheries → Fish, a matter of scales
- Aquaculture → Aquaculture Monitor
Blue Cloud Virtual Labs provide services such as access to datasets, data products, and computation environments that can be deployed to analyze datasets and generate research results.
Integration and Function
To make the overlay of wildlife movement and eco-geographical layer possible, the “Wildlife Tracker” framework retrieves wildlife tracking datasets in real-time updates from Argos satellite live-feed from Movebank. In addition to that, Blue Cloud and Copernicus Marine Service data are integrated to retrieve datasets of ocean biogeochemistry and physical variables. In specific, as for the Blue Cloud data infrastructure, the global ocean three-dimensional (3D) key phytoplankton products from the Biodiversity demonstrator are utilized. With the Chl-a concentration as a proxy for phytoplankton diversity accessed through Blue Cloud Virtual Lab of Zoo and Phytoplankton EOV products, the analysis of animal movement overlaid with the phytoplankton map is illustrated in the figure below.
With the flexible integration of Blue Cloud and other data providers on “Wildlife Tracker”, the geo-framework offers analytical functionalities and the following customizable features such as:
- Geospatial Visualization
- Create your own web maps.
- Include selected animal individuals’ tags in your study area
2. Wildlife Monitoring
- Activate an alert system connected with the user’s personal smartphone that can be configured based on anthropogenic threats or customized geofence
3. Ocean Datasets
- Overlay real-time ocean parameters like Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and Chlorophyll concentration (Chl-a) in your visualization
4. Data Analytics (in development)
- Eco-geographical annotation. Match time and location of tracks with ocean datasets.
- Generate up-to-date statistics based on movement analytics
- Calculate metrics such as daily traveled distances, time spent in protected areas, duration of stops with spatial-temporal parameters, and activity space
5. Accessibility
- Download your own web map with the current configuration
- Upload and update it to your own personal cloud on Github
- Share your up-to-date web map configuration online to other people with your personal link
Pilot demo with “Galapagos Whale Shark Project”
As a successful story of marine conservation application, “Wildlife Tracker v0.3” has been demonstrated for the implementation of the “Galapagos Whale Shark Project” with the aim to support the management of the Galapagos Marine Reserve and the protection of endangered marine species and pristine ecosystems.
Thanks to the project support, the “Wildlife Tracker” gets access to live data of tagged whale sharks in the open ocean around the islands. Then, through the “Wildlife Tracker v0.3” platform, marine scientists can customize the map and ocean monitoring data, and overlay the movements of whale sharks with Chl-a concentration from the Blue Cloud Service as a proxy for phytoplankton and zooplankton productivity.
“Wildlife Tracker” improves the research and data analysis experiences of the Galapagos marine scientists by gathering all of the observations and monitoring data in one web-based application and providing the customizable assessment of combined wildlife monitoring, ocean datasets, interactive geo-visualization, and data analytics that can support the telemetry research and MPAs assessment. With “Wildlife Tracker”, marine scientists can shorten their data collection and analysis time by working comprehensively with our interactive platform, easily keep track of the new live update of the animal behavior and surrounding environment for better decision-making on marine conservation and receive alert notification of unexpected conditions such as wildlife is out of the protected area or found in the land.
The story of “Wildlife Tracker” implementation in the “Galapagos Whale Shark Project” is told in the following video.
If you are willing to know more about this implementation in the Galapagos Whale Shark Project, follow the next blog post.
What is coming next?
In the future, “Wildlife Tracker” will keep deploying more specialized integrations of ocean satellite data from providers like Blue Cloud to develop our user experiences and geoinformatics capabilities.
One of the main development will be the implementation of the Fishing Effort Index (hour of fishing) provided by Global Fishing Watch to represent fishing pressure for biodiversity monitoring. For a better data analytics experience, the eco-geographical annotation of wildlife tracking datasets (time, location, and depth) will be further updated. Our plans are also to develop regional demos like the one presented in Blue Cloud Hackathon. Here is a view of the Azores Islands demo that we hope we can make work on-site with marine scientists.
The aim is to offer a tailor-made geo-framework as a SaaS-based on the specific need of our users such as movement algorithms, environmental indicators, or the alert system and early response to the MPAs assessment for the MPAs regulators. It is the “Wildlife Tracker” mission to take the advantage of earth observation data and digital transformation to support marine scientists and institutional work on wildlife telemetry research on marine wildlife conservation and the assessment of marine spatial planning.
