Satellite Imagery and AI: A New Era in Ocean Conservation, from Research
  to Deployment and Impact
Patrick Beukema Favyen Bastani Piper Wolters Henry Herzog Joe Ferdinando
Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing poses a global threat to
ocean habitats. Publicly available satellite data offered by NASA and the
European Space Agency (ESA) provide an opportunity to actively monitor this
activity. Effectively leveraging satellite data for maritime conservation
requires highly reliable machine learning models operating globally with
minimal latency. This paper introduces three specialized computer vision models
designed for synthetic aperture radar (Sentinel-1), optical imagery
(Sentinel-2), and nighttime lights (Suomi-NPP/NOAA-20). It also presents best
practices for developing and delivering real-time computer vision services for
conservation. These models have been deployed in Skylight, a real time maritime
monitoring platform, which is provided at no cost to users worldwide.