How Big Data Can Help Save The Earth
The earth is having a difficult time, for quite a while now. Climate change is causing it to rapidly heat up in many different places around the globe. July was the hottest month across the globe ever measured, and 2019 is on track to be one of the warmest years, according to data released last by the European Union’s Earth observation network.
Deforestation is still happening at a large scale across the globe, in Brazil alone, 40,200 hectares were deforested in the past year. The great pacific garbage patch is still growing and smog in Beijing is more common than a normal bright day. This is nothing new, unfortunately, and with Trump leaving the Paris agreement, it seems that problems will remain for a bit longer. However, there is some good news. Since a few years, scientists, companies and governments are turning to Big Data to solve climate change problems or even prevent such problems from happening. It turns out that Big Data can help save the earth and if done correctly, it could lead to significant results in the coming years. Let’s have a look at some fascinating use cases of how Big Data can contribute:
Conservation International, a non-profit environmental organization with a mission to protect nature and its biodiversity, crunches vast amounts of data from images to monitor biodiversity around the world. At 16 important sites across the continents, they have installed over 1000 smart cameras. Thanks to the motion sensor, these cameras capture images as soon as the sensor is triggered by animals passing by. As a result, per site these cameras cover approximately 2.000 square kilometres.
In the past years, Conversation International has captured massive amounts of data, although that data had to be downloaded manually. The cameras are installed at remote locations and scientists need to download the images at location, manually and subsequently upload it to the cloud. Artificial intelligence is used to automatically determine which species have appeared in the images and the data is enriched with other information such as climate data, flora and fauna data and land use data to better understand how animal populations change over time.
Today, all that data is analysed using advanced analytics, which allows researchers to achieve results in a short time span once the data is uploaded. Together with HP engineers, they have developed the Wildlife Picture Index (WPI) Analytics System, a project dashboard and analytics tool for visualizing user-friendly, near real-time data-driven insights on the biodiversity. The WPI monitors ground-dwelling tropical medium and large mammals and birds, species that are important economically, aesthetically and ecologically.
In addition, mapping deforestation is becoming a lot easier today thanks to Big Data.
