Dr Moritz Lehmann is Senior Scientist with Xerra Earth Observation Institute and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the University of Waikato. He explains how the Starboard software platform analyses information from satellites to monitor marine vessels and investigate their activities.
Jargon alert:
- AIS: automatic identification systems (AIS) are used by ships to automatically provide their positions, identification and additional information to other ships and to coastal authorities.
Questions for discussion:
- In what ways does Starboard® Maritime Intelligence help to monitor the activities of maritime vessels?
- Why does Starboard choose to use multiple satellites to detect dark vessels?
- What myth about satellites does Moritz bust?
Transcript
Dr Moritz Lehmann
Aquatic remote sensing scientist
Senior Scientist, Xerra Earth Observation Institute
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, University of Waikato
Xerra is a regional research institute to promote and use Earth observation for science research, industry and government. And we tend to define Earth observation as remote sensing. Remote sensing really means that we’re looking at something not from close up but from further away – we’re looking at the Earth from space. But you could also do remote sensing from drones or from aircraft.
Starboard is the name for our maritime domain awareness platform that lets you look at all the ship traffic globally. You’d be amazed how many ships are out there, and it’s hugely fascinating to see where they’re going and what they’re up to.
But there are a lot of questions that actually matter quite a bit. For example, the fishing fleets. Where are they fishing? Is there any fishing going on in marine reserves? Or are there even vessels that are trying to hide that they’re actually fishing?
One of the relatively common illegal activities in fishery is transshipment at sea – so where a ship goes out to catch a valuable species1 such as tuna2 and it moves up close to another ship, transfers the catch so that catch doesn’t show up when they go into the next port. And if this happens in the high seas, it’s extremely difficult to detect. Starboard takes the global AIS signal, the global information system that all ships from a certain size have to have on board. But ships that want to hide their activities would disable the AIS transponder3. A dark vessel is what we call a vessel that does not transmit its location via the AIS system, and so we have to resort to other means of detecting them. And using satellites, we can take optical images of ships and you could see them. But it’s not the most efficient way because the ocean is often cloudy and ships tend to be small in the scale of things.
So we often use radar4 satellites – called SAR or synthetic aperture radar – where the radar emissions from the satellite5 ping back from the steel surface of the ship and then are detected again at the satellite. This data6 we collect, and then we compare it to known vessels from the AIS locations, and we can then just map them.
The satellite monitoring of dark vessel detection in particular, you are really somewhat limited by the opportunities that the satellites provide. Some of the myths about satellites are that a satellite is always overhead – the eye in the sky that sees everything – and satellites are really not like that. They have orbits, they fly around the world really, really fast. And so they only cover the same spot on the surface of our planet – in the best case – every day, but in many cases, it takes them weeks to go back to it.
Starboard is developed for the global market. However, we’re starting in New Zealand with very domestic applications. For example, we’re interested in biosecurity7. We like to know where ships came from, container ships that may have pests on board such as brown marmorated stink bug.
Acknowledgements
Dr Moritz Lehmann, Xerra Earth Observation Institute and University of Waikato Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato
Xerra website, satellite images of sediment8 washing from river to ocean, red-coloured lake, Mount Ruapehu and Starboard Maritime Intelligence app, Xerra Earth Observation Institute
Animation of satellite deploying solar array, Sentinel-3B Earth Observation Satellite, SARS image of ships in Suez Canal contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2021) CC BY-SA 2.0, Copernicus Sentinel-6 in action, satellite above Earth and Sentinel-1 field of view, all European Space Agency (ESA)
Drone footage, Aeronavics Limited
Commercial and illegal fishing, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, CC BY 3.0
Boat AIS system, Sailing Yacht Salty Lass, CC BY 3.0
