2020 Esri Canada GIS Ocean Forum | Virtual, October 13
Our Ocean, Our Future
Dawn J. Wright, Ph.D. and
GISP
Esri Chief Scientist
@deepseadawn
Our world today is in trouble. It's safe to say that what we've done with
environmental degradation and the issues of social instability are creating a bit of uncertainty for all of us. Any one of these issues is overwhelming. And they're all interconnected — climate change, natural disasters, loss of nature, overpopulation. And addressing these issues is going to be challenging for all of us for the rest of our lives, requiring new governance, policy, and market approaches. IN THE OCEAN
- warmer oceans will increase the energy available to hurricanes, so they can intensify faster and yet move more slowly (absorbing all that heat) and sit over us longer and dumping even more rain on us
- 30% of fish stocks are overfished and 60% are fully exploited
- Illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing costs $23B per year in lost revenue - If OA and ocean warming trends continue, all coral reefs could be
unrecognizable by 2050
- Ocean is on course to contain an estimated 1 kg of plastic for every 3 kg of fish within 10 years
Thank goodness indeed for our ocean as it is the foundation for life hosting the largest biosphere on the planet and up to 80% of ALL life on Earth
Generating over 50% of the oxygen that we breathe
Providing a HUGE buffer against the harmful impacts of climate change By absorbing 25% of all CO2 emissions for us
And capturing 90% of the additional generated by those emissions
AND YET only 7% protected of the ocean is protected – according to NatGeo’s Pristine Seas (as compared to 15% of land)
And only 2.4% is FULLY protected (no-take)
This is where WE come to the rescue as we continue organize the ocean’s geographic knowledge to solve these challenges and to SAVE it. We are creating those all important building blocks of shared understanding through data models that organize it, through analytic process models and interpretive models, through maps and visualizations, through the stories that we tell now enhanced with digital story maps, through the reports, the infographics, the dashboards that we create, and, of course, the workflows themselves.
These building blocks are transforming how we see the ocean, and of course how we see the world.
This infrastructure is emerging really rapidly. Individual systems are beginning to link together and share their data, interconnecting and bringing in services from external sources. The basemaps in ArcGIS Online are an example of this. But geocoding, spatial analytics, and the ecosystem of distributed services being brought together to empower these systems is also bringing together people to collaborate and use information in new and important ways.
The people doing this are the scientists, the conservationists, the GIS professionals, YOU. How wonderful that YOU are applying the science of geography almost everywhere, including for so many independent and focused systems and projects. And thanks to the amazing technologies of the web, these are becoming interconnected, as a socially-accessible infrastructure, opening many new opportunities for collaborative action.
Turning very briefly to Esri, Inc., here’s a peek at our main sector teams in terms of sales, marketing, and professional services.
VERTICAL sector (AEC = Architecture, Engineering & Construction; GLOBAL REGION (where WAMEA = West Asia, Middle East, and Africa). HORIZONTAL cross-sector
Our main MARKETS are traditional GIS, maps made by the GIS, and the emerging force of location intelligence (re: climate risk, why things happen and when they happen to gain business advantage)
Our business model is to sell ArcGIS via enterprise licensing agreement, industry bundles, individual products; along with the necessary training/e-learning, consulting, managed cloud services (hosting, backup, archive, system monitoring)
Ocean/Maritime is squarely within most of these applied, “vertical” sectors, as well as the cross-cutting “horizontal” ones
Drilling down into more detail it is ESPECIALLY in these sectors
Ocean, weather and climate agencies within state/local/national government Transportation and Logistics including Maritime Ports of Call
Municipal Public Safety including Emergency Management
Ocean-based renewable energy siting, wind, wave, and tidal energy infrastructure
Energy efficient shipping, ports – supply chains – you have goods such as toilet paper because of shipping (and trucking – just about every single thing that you buy was delivered on a cargo ship or a truck) J
Fisheries, aquaculture operations
…that the Esri Platform serves as the connecting rod between climate risk information producers and end user communities. Our role is unique in providing the end user applications and development tools that information providers, consultants, and organizations use as they seek to spatially analyze climate risk, and impacts to business interests, assets, mission objectives and more. Our technology provides both the end user environments that we will demonstrate today, as well as the development tools for organizations to develop their own specific workflows or end user applications. Another main approach to this market is to ensure that we develop our technology to support the capacity of “big” climate data dissemination, as well as the analytics for these big data. And of course these analytics include the emerging capabilities of A/I, and within that machine learning and deep learning to identify patterns in the data.
We see climate risk management as one of the most significant and emerging areas of Esri’s user community and as you’ll see in the demos that follow, are increasing the capabilities in our software and services to support climate data and dissemination.
Submarine cables is an amazing example within the Transportation/Logistics and Utilities . We would not have the Internet without them.
Indeed these cables carry signals across the ocean in fractions of a second; enabling telephone, public and private private data transmission, and internet including streaming video (in this case from the BBC or Britbox!). This is another reason why we need the detailed knowledge of the global seafloor which is the goal of Seabed 2030 initiative. And cabled networks for SCIENCE are indeed amazingly valuable too, as we will hear from Kate Moran of Ocean Networks Canada – please don’t miss that presentation
https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=5ba169ff89fe4328933c828e0c290f 92
Another great example is the growing network of sensors and IoT especially to monitor and track IUU fishing via AIS and precise radio frequency signals – showing also an R Studio session bridged with ArcGIS where appropriate feature services, image services, REST APIs, JSONs, and geodatabases can be more fully analyzed and interactively mapped
(e.g., Hawkeye 360 is a Silver-level Esri business partner, https://www.he360.com/about/)
HawkEye 360 is a Radio Frequency (RF) data analytics company. We operate a first-of-its-kind commercial satellite constellation to identify, process, and geolocate a broad set of RF signals. They extract value from this unique data through proprietary algorithms, fusing it with other sources to create powerful analytical products that solve hard challenges for our global customers. Their products include maritime domain awareness and spectrum mapping and monitoring; their customers include a wide range of commercial, government and international entities.
And turning now to the all-important UN Sustainable Development Goals, SDG 14 of course is all about “Life Below Water” with an eye toward reducing
marine debris and other types of pollution, managing and protecting the ocean, ending overfishing, addressing ocean acidification
And we are heading into the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, officially beginning next year, with so many amazing initiatives such as SDGs Today, powered by a global GIS
Toward this end, Esri is working with a loosely-connecting network of organizations , with special ocean collaborations both formal and informal indicated in yellow
Centre for the 4th Industrial Revolution-Ocean in Norway is an affiliate of the World Economic Forum’s C4IR Network, and is currently building the Ocean Data Platform
POGO = Partnership for Global Ocean Observation RCN = Research Coordination Network
E.O. Wilson Foundation in building the Half Earth Map
A big part of this effort is our new Living Atlas Indicators of the Planet, which is like a “report card” for the entire Earth. If you go to this URL the indicators fill up your entire browser window. We’ve partnered with@microsoft, @natgeo, and the@UnitedNationsSustainable Development Solutions Network to compile 18 pressing topics affecting our planet with real-time or near real-time data to match. We keep these indicators updated up to the minute with hosted
Python notebooks touching the data in the cloud with AI that provides dynamic integration of data from multiple sources, and then running consistent analytics on the fly. One can click on each indicator to go deeper
with higher resolution maps and resources
The result is a single point to understand the day to day and year to year changes that are occurring on Earth. As you can see these are marked by the relevant SDG and there are several for the ocean. The Living Atlas, by the way
Indeed it is so exciting to see this global framework emerging with all of you a part of it...involving and supporting many organizations and communities, all seeking to share data sets and services, dramatically extending the impact of GIS toward helping ocean data achieve its full benefit. We’re seeing 3 great examples here in the digital globes, the middle one supporting Esri’s
contribution toward the GEO Blue PlanetTeam’s initiative around SDG indicator 14.1.1 on coastal eutrophication (and by 2025). And the far left is work in progress on under the EO Wilson Biodiversity Foundation Half Earth initiative. In addition When Seabed 2030 was launched in 2017, only 6 % of the seafloor had been mapped to modern standards . Now that coverage has risen from 15 per cent to 19 per cent in the last year.
We are SO all in this together as we’ve known certainly since this iconic photo was taken on Christmas Eve 1968 by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders.
Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, byApollo 8astronautWilliam Anders. Photo now in the public domain.
“Taken byApollo 8crewmemberBill Anderson December 24, 1968, at mission time 075:49:07[8](16:40 UTC), while in orbit around the Moon, showing the Earth rising for the third time above the lunar horizon. The lunar horizon is approximately 780 kilometers from the spacecraft. Width of the photographed area at the lunar horizon is about 175 kilometers.[9]The land mass visible just above the terminator line is west Africa. Note that this phenomenon is only visible to an observer in motion relative to the lunar surface. Because of the Moon's synchronous rotation relative to the Earth (i.e., the same side of the Moon is always facing Earth), the Earth appears to be stationary (measured in anything less than a geological timescale) in the lunar "sky". In order to observe the effect of Earth rising or setting over the Moon's horizon, an observer must travel towards or away from the point on the lunar surface where the Earth is most directly overhead (centred in the sky). Otherwise, the Earth's apparent
In this spirit I show the global ocean in the Adams Square II projection to recreate Althestan Spilhaus’ Ocean Map, which is now available in ArcGIS Pro (cartography by John Nelson of Esri). This could be just what the ocean needs to get the
attention its problems deserve. Thanks to Mathieu Belbeoch et al. JCOMM-OPS for requesting this of Esri. This projection is coming to ArcGIS Pro 2.5 with a Spilhaus Projected Coordinate System (PCS). The Adams_Square_II projection and the Spilhaus PCS are also going to be in ArcMap at Desktop 8.0. The projection
algorithm that is used for this PCS is the Adams Square II projection. It is the use of a particular set of parameters for the Adams Square II projection that describes this particular PCS.
Athelstan Spilhaus was a distinguished meteorologist, oceanographer, and inventor, having designed the bathythermograph, the weather balloon that was mistaken for a UFO over Roswell, New Mexico, and the skyways of Minneapolis, MN.
In the weeds cartographically: The Adams Square II projection can be used to re-create the Spilhaus map. It is actually based on work done by Oscar Adams in the 1920’s, but David Burrows of Esri’s Projection Geometry team has extended the equations to be fully oblique, which allows for the Spilhaus configuration, while also ellipsoidal, which allows for true conformality on an ellipsoid.
Athelstan Spilhaus worked with two researchers of the US National Geodetic Survey (NGS), Robert Hanson and Erwin Schmid, in 1979 to develop the map. The map was published but the equations or methods were never exposed. It just so happens that Oscar Adams worked for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, the precursor to the current NGS.
Hopefully I’ve said all the right words, but this virtual conference is about exemplars for ACTION -- for SOLUTIONS -- so I am so happy that all of you are here to learn from my colleagues and be inspired by what I’ll call “practical innovations.” Have a great meeting!
