Thanks for coming and thanks for having me here.

Yes, I work for WWF and I'm going to tell you a little bit about the cool technology we are using for conservation. So, where are we in the world? We understand that we have an increasing population, increasing consumption, and we only have one planet. I don't know where to stand here. My dad went to the

climate march and he had a shirt that said there is no planet B. So, there is only one planet and basically the goal of WWF is three fold. We have a mission based on three pillars. We want to protect natural areas, protected areas and wildlife. We want to promote natural resource

conservation, so sustainable use, and ensure more efficient resource use, so basically eliminating pollution. This is the goal of WWF and you might be wondering what peanut butter has to do with that and I will explain in a little bit. WWF works globally. The map in front of you, every dark grey country

is a place where we have an office or representation and every orange area is what we call a terrestrial priority ecoregion and the blue areas are the marine ecoregions. Today, I'm going to tell you about four different projects that we have around the world and the stars are represented there. We're going to start with coastal East Africa

and Mozambique. Then we're going to go to the Democratic Republic of Congo in Central Africa. Then I'll show you some cool videos from the Northern Great Plains in the United States and finally an example of a cool project in Malaysia, Sabah. So this is my awesome title. I came over to Germany

from WWF US and I stayed because they gave me this really great title. It has 43 letters in it. It's the first word I learned. People love hearing me say that and what does it mean? Well, I'll break it up for you. German words are all together. It involves satellite, remote, far away, exploration,

specialists. That's what I do basically. I observe the Earth. I explore the Earth primarily with satellites but as I'm going to explain, there's a lot of new technologies now that enable us to go beyond just satellites. We have drones, airplanes, kites, you name it. So remote

sensing, where does this come from? It's actually an old science. One of the pioneers of remote sensing in the 1880s was this French gentleman who attached a camera to a kite and the kite had some sort of fuse system and it would take photos and this is one of the first remote sensing photos from that kite.

Pretty amazing for 1800s, right? So seeing something from so high up. A couple of years later we had some Germans in the game. I don't know if you can see this cool photo. Somewhere in Western Germany. I don't know if you've noticed what's on the edges of the photo.

It's the wings of this Bavarian pigeon core. With the advent of small cameras, I guess your first GoPro, they were able to basically tie them to these poor pigeons and have them fly around and they would take photos. So these are really like the first attempts at remote sensing which is basically

seeing something from far away, from above, from a new perspective and it can really provide just lots of interesting information more than you can see on the ground. You can see a lot more from up in the sky. So that was the 1900s. Where are we now? This is actually a representation

of every satellite, space station and piece of space debris that is around the world. It's a website called Stuff in Space and you can go and actually click on every single one of those little dots and see what they are. One of them is the space station. There's tons of satellites, communication satellites, GPS satellites,

optical satellites which I'll show you. All that stuff is floating up there and some people like to track, I guess, where everything is. So we've come a long way. Let's just wait until that video ends. So where are we now? These are

some of the newer satellites that are being launched. I showed you a big one next to a small one and this is a launch, a video launch from the International Space Station and this is a company called Planet Labs. They've actually created these tiny satellites that are the size of a toaster. They use basically cell phone technology and there are a bunch of guys in a garage in Silicon Valley and they made these

satellites that they launched from the International Space Station and they launched like 80 to 100 of them and their goal is to image everywhere on the Earth every day because once they have like 80 or 100 of these guys in space, they'll be able to basically position them everywhere and basically see the Earth.

So this is the astronauts taking the pictures of that launching from the International Space Station. So we've come a long way from cameras on pigeons. Now we have these nanosatellites so yeah, they're about this big. And just imagine that when you can take a picture of anywhere on Earth every day

you can start to look at changes, you can start to look at a lot of interesting things. And what do we have now? We also have cell phones, right? We have cell phones with integrated GPS. This is an example of a project we have in Zambia where we've given these smart phones to some local farmers and taught them how to use it

and they can basically put data into a system. This is an example of an agricultural monitoring system. We're helping people implement new conservation agriculture methods and they document how much they planted, what's there, if there's been any baboons or hippos or elephants coming and ruining the crops

and so on. And we can chart that all in real time. So when our guys in Zambia hit send, the data pops up on our map. Right, so these are the new technologies that are really enabling us to connect to our world and to see what's happening. And that's what makes me a remote sensing specialist is I sit in front of a desk most of the time and I can see all these things remotely.

And we also take, we do go back to the old I guess the old methodologies, but this is a photo I took from a kite. That's me with the kite, putting it on there. I attached a GoPro to this kite in Zambia and you can see our car hiding in the shade over there. And it got pretty high up to about 100 meters. And we're looking into new ways

that we can use kites basically to fly in places where you have a lot of wind where maybe a drone might get taken away. And you don't need a permit to fly a kite. Anybody can fly a kite. It's really simple technology. So these are some of the cheaper ways that we can take photos of what's on the ground.

So yeah, that's me and the kite. So yeah, the satellite part of my job involves using satellite imagery. And this is a cool project in Mozambique where we are mapping actually what's underwater. So in Mozambique in 2012 there was a new protected area implemented.

It's the largest marine protected area in Africa. And it's in central Mozambique. And it's called Primeras and Segundas because it has a set of well, first and second islands, which I guess is what they looked like when they were discovered. They call them the first set of islands and the second set of islands. And you can see them here along the coast of Mozambique. And they have fascinating wildlife.

Lots of interesting species. Lots of coral reefs. The thing there is that these little islands, they're really tiny. If you go on Google, actually you want to look at that island right here. If you go on Google this is what it looks like. So you have the coast there and then you have these kind of pretty rough waters and these tiny little islands with reefs around them.

And the issues there is that you have lots of people depending on fisheries there. Lots of poor people. There's lots of conflicts with other fisheries and so on. And the idea is that we have this new protected area. We have this new park. But in order to manage a park we need to know what's there. Right? It's just like if you had a, what's in the

tear garden. You need to know where your trees are and where your roads are and all those things like that. So we need to know what is where and able to manage it. So that little island up there, that's called Isla Mafamede. And this is what it looks like with a two meter resolution satellite image from Digital Globe. That little bit on the top is an island and that whole area is the coral reef

around it. And I'll just zoom into that island. That's what it looks like. And you can see that photo. It's a pretty bare hidden piece of land. There's a little lighthouse right there and there's kind of barely any trees. And it's really in the middle of nowhere. So it's pretty tough for people to get out there. It's really hard for our staff to live there and so on.

So we need to get a better view from space. As you can see around this island we have some sea grass and there's some coral and so on. And this is kind of what it looks like from the ground. You have these, this is a boat with one of those homemade sails. And there's probably like 20 fishermen packed onto that boat. This is very labor intensive work. It's a very rough place

to survive, but that's what these people depend on, right? So we took the satellite image and then I had a really clever student from University of Lund go around in a boat. She hired a boat with these guys and the top photo there, I don't know if you see, there's something called the glass bottom bucket. It's got a, it's a bucket with a glass bottom on it

just like it sounds. And you put it down in the water from the boat and you can take photos and they look like the photo on the bottom. And they went all around you can see here and they measured the depth with a sounder and all the different types of habitats that they saw. And basically from that we can determine from the satellite image we can actually measure depth. And this is because, as you know, corals are photosynthetic

organisms. They live in clear water so the light penetrates, meaning that the satellite can actually see through the water and we can see the coral that's at the bottom of the ocean basically. So this is a satellite-derived bathymetry and you can see it in 3D on your right. So you can actually see the corals that are slightly shallower than the sand around it. And it's really cool

for basically figuring out what's out there. So we've mapped the habitats, all these different kinds of reefs and vegetation. And just to show you what the nautical charts look like, if you've ever been a sailor on a boat you get these charts to help you navigate. And the chart is really bad. It was made in 1847 or something from the British Admiralty. It's super out of date.

And what we did is we took that information from the satellite image and we were able to update the nautical charts. So now we can basically safeguard these reefs now against any shipwrecks. Nobody has any excuse not to see this reef on the map. So that's just one example of how to use satellite imagery. Next I'm going to show you what we do

with lasers on a plane. And this is some airborne imagery. So a plane-mounted laser is another way to collect information on forests. And this is basically there's a laser sitting on a plane. It shoots the pulse into the forest. It bounces around and it comes back. And you can measure that. And this is, funny enough, an example I got from a company I work with in southern Africa.

I don't know if you can tell what's in the middle of that image. There's a tree. There's something next to that tree. I'll zoom in. I don't know if you can see what it is, but it's a giraffe. And the giraffe has gotten LIDARed. And basically this is what the LIDAR data tells you. Those lasers that go down. They bounce all over the trees and they bounce all over the giraffe's head and body and bounce back.

And we've also, there's some partners. The government in Gabon has collected data on LIDAR. And just to show you a little bit more of what it looks like in cool 3D. This is an image of an urban LIDAR area. And you're going to see a tilt in 3D. And basically you can see the roofs of the houses. You can see the billboard across the highway. You can see the

streets, I'm sorry, the cars on the streets, power lines. Really cool way to collect data. And basically that just is a plane flying over and collecting the stuff. So yeah, pretty awesome. And this is what it looks like in the Democratic Republic of Congo where we collected over 400,000 hectares of LIDAR data

in the last couple years. So that's an image on the top row from the plane. So it takes a photo. That's what it looks like, right? You see canopy and trees. But then if you get a cross section of that forest, you can actually see how high the canopy is, how high the structure is, and what it looks like in the forest. And just to show you what we do with that, with the LIDAR, we convert it to canopy height.

We can do digital terrain model. And actually we convert that to biomass. And that's important because we want to know how much carbon is stored in the forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And the LIDAR has really helped us do that to mitigate climate change, to help start these emissions reductions projects, and so on. And so we've provided the Democratic

Republic of Congo with a national carbon map, which has just been, the report has just come out last week. So we've mapped all the forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo, over 2.2 million square kilometers of forest at one hectare resolution. We can tell you how much biomass is in it and how precise or accurate that is. And all the data

that I talked to you about is actually open data. There's a talk at the same time right now by the European Space Agency. Our data is all open and being shared with everybody. You can download it and I'll tell you where. So now for the more interesting stuff. I know you guys all came here to hear about drones. Everybody loves drones. Except that I know that drones kind of get a bad name. A lot of times when you hear drones

you think Obama is bombing ISIS or something or you watched an episode of Homeland and Claire Danes is the drone queen and you know, everybody thinks they have missiles on them but drones are not all that bad. And I just want to say that I like to call them drones. I don't like to call them unmanned aerial vehicles because I'm a woman and so everything I do is unmanned.

So I think we should just call them drones. And so there's actually lots of different applications to drones. There's not just bombing ISIS and killing people. There's a huge science and research component which is what I'm going to talk to you about. You might have heard of some goods delivery. Amazon is delivering stuff with drones now. You can order something

and in Washington D.C. I was there last month. They actually have a robot that goes on the street and delivers your package. So totally autonomous package delivery. That's clearly military and law enforcement. Medical equipment delivery. You can deliver medicine to where people need it.

Traffic and navigation, obviously following people. And of course all those cool photos and videos you see from drones, that's a big part of the drone industry. But I'm going to talk to you about some cool innovative ways that my colleagues have used drones. So I use drones a lot and they make nice photos but my colleagues at WFUS have done way cooler stuff with the drones.

And I'm going to tell you about this interesting problem we have here. It's in the northern Great Plains. So it's a large area in the central U.S. Iconic landscape of grasslands and so on. And what you have are these species called the black-footed ferrets. And they're incredibly cute. And they always look into the camera when they take their photo.

You'll see them in the video. They're just super, super cute. But believe it or not, these guys are carnivores. They eat prairie dogs. And prairie dogs are considered like the chicken nuggets of the Great Plains. They're just the tasty bits that everybody wants to eat. The problem is that the prairie dogs got sick.

There was a plague. And they all got really sick. And then when there's no prairie dogs there's no ferrets. So the issue was that to save the ferrets you had to vaccinate the prairie dogs. How do you vaccinate the prairie dogs? All in the middle of nowhere. I'm going to show you in this video But the thing is the vaccines, what they did is they had to put it in this peanut butter

that the prairie dogs would eat. And so that's why finding the right peanut butter is important. Apparently it can't be chunky. It has to be smooth. And so I'm going to show you a video right now about my colleagues and how they're using drones to basically save the black-footed ferret. This is an awesome video. Black-footed ferrets were thought to be extinct two different times

and have been on the Endangered Species Act for a long time. And a lot of people are working to recover. Ferrets are an obligate predator of prairie dogs. That's the only place they can live and survive is on prairie dog colonies. Probably one of the biggest obstacles to ferret recovery is plague because it's highly lethal to both prairie dogs and ferrets.

And it can wipe out thousands of acres of prairie dogs in just a few weeks. If we don't protect their prey base, the prairie dogs, they would have nothing to eat anyway. So it's important for us to find a way to manage plague in prairie dogs as well as ferrets. So we developed the vaccine first and then we started looking for baits that we could

deliver it to prairie dogs. And we put peanut butter into it as an attractant for the prairie dogs as well as mix the vaccine right in. It takes maybe more than 10,000 acres of prairie dogs to support what might be a viable ferret population. And the objectives under World Wildlife Fund and all the partners that we work with is to remove

the black footed ferret from the endangered species list. But if we're going to start treating thousands of acres, we have to find a distribution system. And our best idea so far is a unit that will distribute from ATVs. Sort of a hopper that will drop one pellet straight down and then shoot one to the left and shoot one to the right 30 feet simultaneously.

And I've been able to treat about 50 acres per hour on an ATV. And then the other idea came up with using unmanned aerial systems. There's a lot of places I imagine that are going to be not ATV accessible and that's where this little guy is really going to show its true worth. So we have loaded the correct amount of

pellets. We'll put the hopper on wheel. We go ahead and click into autonomous mode and then it takes off and does its mission. We're about 60 feet up flying at about 20 miles per hour. So you can watch it go down a transect line on the computer so we get to see exactly what's going on. So every one second it will drop a pellet.

So they eat the baits and that immunizes them against the disease. This project has involved so many collaborators. The molecular biologists that created the vaccine in the first place. All the field partners that have helped us. I think it's something like 30 different agencies involved in this project. We've talked a long time about how we would deliver millions of baits to prairie dogs.

And so it's been great to see these people get together and really figure out how we could do it. This project fits well with the mission of World Wildlife Fund to use the best available science to achieve our conservation objectives and to bring back the endangered black-footed ferret. So pretty cool, right?

I bet you never thought of that. So yes, that's the great thing with drones right now. Oh, thanks. You can clap. Yeah, so those are our colleagues at World Wildlife Fund US where I used to work. Yeah, and that's the great thing about drones is that while they're

pretty affordable, you can build them yourself like this one was. I buy them on Amazon. They're really cheap. I have three drones right now and you can just get them delivered and fly them tomorrow. Of course, all within the rules and being safe and so on. But the great thing is that you can program them like you saw. They fly all by themselves and it's kind of

I guess a couple years ago I was really anti-drones. I was like, why is everybody talking about drones? It seems so annoying. You can get satellite imagery now that has 10 or 20 centimeter resolution. Why do you need drone data? And the fact is for things like this and because you can get data in real time right away, you can basically take your drone out into the field and fly it around and collect your data.

And I also like the fact that the drone removes the remote part of my job because it means I can actually go into the field and be on the ground and work with my colleagues and fly and collect data and so I get to connect a little bit more to the environment. So we're dropping the satellite, we're dropping the remote part of my job. Alright, the last example

I'm going to show you before we go into the questions is some more cute pictures. It's basically a great project they've done in Malaysia. These are the orangutans. You know the orangutans, they live in the forest, they live in nests up in the canopy. And of course they're also critically endangered with fires and land use change,

deforestation, conversion of Borneo forest to oil palm. So it's really important to know where the orangutans live, how many of them there are, and how they're doing. And so the way they usually survey nests is with helicopters. So it's really expensive. You fly a helicopter around, you have five people sitting in it, and they

count basically from above. This is how they count a lot of species actually also in Africa as well. But then they had the idea of maybe we could use a drone to fly over the forest and take some photos, and then we could just look at the photos. And so the drone, and this is a fixed wing drone, so it flies a lot longer, you program it, it kind of

flies around, comes back, you download the data, and you look at the photos. And I'm going to show you a photo, and you're not going to think there's any orangutan nests in that photo, but there are in fact, there's little circles around them, I think there's like five or six. So our trained colleagues at WWF Malaysia would look at the photos, circle the nests,

and try to find out how many nests there were in the image. And what's interesting is they compared that to counting the same area with the nests from the ground, as well as counting from the helicopter. And the interesting thing is, well, results of the drone actually aren't that bad. Of course you get more nests

when you're on the ground, you can see them and you can go there, but you actually get more nests counted accurately from the drone than from a helicopter. So that shows really easily why it's cheaper and easier to just fly a drone or go on the ground. Of course it's not always ideal to go on the ground, it's really hard to get through, it's a huge mess

sometimes, so the drone is actually a really good suitable replacement. So this was my convincing thing that maybe, okay, fine, drones can do a good thing, and then that's kind of when I started to buy them for myself. So hearing that in my talk, I had some pretty quick. I was talking about all the open data we have and all the information

that we produce at WWF. There's a website called globiel.panda.org. I invite you all to check it out. And in fact on the front page if you just saw that click right there, we have a whole story map on the black-footed ferret work, which includes the vaccinating part you saw, but also a part where they

actually mapped where all these prairie dogs live and all those little mounds and so on. And you can see all the information and data. And we do on the front page also have an open data site. You can click down on globiel.panda.org and take it to our open data that we're adding to all the time. And we're soon going to release all of the LiDAR data and the

biomass data that was developed for the Democratic Republic of Congo project. And so you can access our data there, contact us, see where we're working, and so on. And yeah, that's all. So thanks for attending my talk and come

and find us on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much. Early Shapiro from the World Wide Fund of Nature. And now you know what a satellite

remote exploration specialist does. What we don't know is which questions you want to ask. You, that's Janel Dumelian from Deutsche Welle. She's a journalist and now it's her time.

Great. Hi everyone. Thanks for joining our talk. Great presentation. Thanks. First of all, I wanted to tell you three things. I totally agree with you on drones and not calling them unmanned aerial vehicles. Thank you. I died a little inside when you said black-footed ferrets were carnivores

and I'm totally team prairie dog. And yeah, you are my favorite. Hold on. You're the only one I know. That many of us out there. So tell us, how'd you get into this? Good question. So I went to school in Canada. I love maps.

Who doesn't love maps? I have a million maps in my apartment. And I just started loving maps. Thank you. Yeah, maps. A fan. Yeah, number one fan. And so I started, yeah, I just love maps and I started taking GIS, geographic information systems in college and then I went to graduate school and I just didn't stop. And the whole satellite

thing fell in there and like when Google Earth came around that was like the coolest thing ever. And so, yeah, that's basically the nicest study of satellite remote sensing forever. Oh, ok. Well, it's funny that you mentioned Google Earth because obviously, you know, when people talk about remote sensing or drones, people are worried they're being spied on

their data is being collected. I don't know if you come across that in Germany at all. Just a little, yeah. So what do you say to those people? What do you deal with? It's actually more of a problem with drones. You're right. So with satellite imagery, most of the time you can't see anybody doing anything. You can't recognize anybody. But there is a lot of drone laws and you're not supposed to spy on people.

Which is why you're not supposed to fly a drone in Berlin. If you see somebody flying a drone in Berlin, they're breaking the law because you're not supposed to be able to look into people's apartments or if you catch someone doing an illegal activity and you're illegally spying on them, basically you shouldn't do it. So, yeah, there is that issue in Germany and in

Zambia where we flew, we actually asked for permission from everyone. Anyone who doesn't want to be seen by the drone go into your house. And if you don't want to have your video taken, that's how you do it. But in Europe and in Germany it's an issue. We don't need permission from the black-footed ferrets or anything, so that's good. But yeah, it's something to consider.

And do you find that it's a challenge getting acceptance for this kind of tech when you're on the field? People love all the drone stuff. They go nuts. There's photos of me with like a hundred kids in Zambia going crazy about it. They think it's a robot. People are just, I think, naturally attracted to cool, robotic stuff.

So for that, they like it. And also, we were talking about Google Earth. What does everybody do when they go on Google Earth? The first thing they do is they look for their house, right? Everybody does that. How do we know how our houses look? We never know what it's from. Oh, look, my car is there. So when I went to my first time in Mozambique, we printed out photos of these high-resolution

satellites, like that coral reef image I showed you, and everyone was immediately, oh, there's my house. Like, oh, that's where I live, and there's my village. And they were just super interested in it. And they actually, when I told them they could have the posters at the end, like I had the posters in my hand, and they ripped them out of my hands, and I got paper cuts on all four fingers. That's how much they wanted these maps.

So for that, I think it's hugely acceptance, and they just love to see it. And even you could be in the most remote place in Africa, and people will draw on the sand, they'll draw on the dirt, like this is where my house is, this is where the river is, and this is where I go. And when they see that on a satellite image, they understand it. It's actually really cool. I think it's actually really easy to get it accepted.

That is really cool. But you mentioned paper cuts on your hands, but that's probably not the biggest job hazard you've ever faced. I'm just going to toss that in. So what do you say your biggest challenge was? Oh, in the field? Well, there's been many.

Being asked for bribes all the time is always a hard one. Don't pay bribes. No, there was a time because you asked me about this, one of my toughest experiences, so we were traveling in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and we went on this trip, it was like a two-day boat ride up the river, and canoes, and all this stuff, and we were gone for five days,

and somehow no one had any money. Like, my colleagues only brought euros, and euros is worth absolutely nothing there, and I just happened to have 37 US dollars on me, and I had to support six people for five days with 37 dollars, and even in the middle of the Democratic Republic of Congo, it's kind of hard, and I remember bartering, I was trading granola bars for a live duck so that we could have

dinner. Did you have to kill it yourself? I didn't kill it, we had the boat driver killed it, but we did have to, it was on the boat for like three days, and it was like really scared, and that was difficult, but I had to like basically go to these little markets in the middle of nowhere, and they've never seen white people, and I mean, usually they think you have a lot of money, and I'm like, listen, I only have a dollar and fifty cents, like I need

four of those bread rolls and two carrots, and so I had to like, yeah, basically do some hardcore negotiating, but we survived. I'm glad, otherwise you wouldn't have heard this presentation. Exactly, yeah. 37 dollars, that seems to go a long way. Well, especially when on the first night, all the guys bought like ten beers, and they came to me like I was their mom, they're like, can you pay for our beers? And I was like, that was half of our budget.

Yeah, so. Wise investment? Yeah, I was the only woman on the trip, and I was like the only reasonable person, but yeah. Does that happen to you a lot? Is the remote sensing specialist career not

particularly? Oh yeah, it's totally full of guys. What? It's totally full of guys, there's not many women. What's that? Have you ever been to the DLR, the it's a lot, a lot of guys. Technical computer people, I guess, I don't know. I mean, here it's a little bit different, there's a lot more women, but yeah, I think in my job, it's a very male-dominated world. A lot of these conferences are

mostly men. Yeah. A lot of the digital, I guess, remote sensing scientist conference or whatever, yeah. Well, you know, maybe that'll change. Yeah, I think it will. With the engineering fields and the science, the STEM fields. Exactly. But, speaking of change, I mean, you've been doing this for about 10 years now, so you've seen a lot of the technology

kind of develop in leaps and bounds. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that. How much has changed since you first started doing this job? So when I first started in university, there was no Google Earth, first of all, and we had these really old computers. And it was really crazy, you'd download like one satellite image and it would take like all night to download it, and it would

take like days to work on it, and now it's like, you know, takes a second. There's even some cool tools. I was giving a talk yesterday about Google Earth Engine. It's this amazing platform, which is a cloud-based platform, and you can basically process like gigabytes and gigabytes of data in like two seconds. So that changes everything. And of course, all the different satellites. So back in the

90s when I started, there was basically only one or two satellites you could work with. Actually, no, only basically one that was available and free. And then now there's like more and more satellites, and every year they get a higher resolution and a higher resolution, and like I remember the first high resolution satellite image I saw, we had some imagery of Florida, and where I worked at a previous job, and you could see people were playing doubles

or singles tennis, and that just like blew my mind. You could see on the tennis court like in the image, if there were two people or four people playing. Oh wow. Could you see who was winning? I couldn't see who was winning, yeah. But that was like pretty amazing, and when like that whole revolution happened with all those commercial satellites, that kind of like, that literally changed everything, I think.

So that made everything, yeah, just way more insane. And it's only gotten better. And so now, another thing is a lot of these spy satellites, I'm sure there's lots of even higher resolution out there, but now with these little satellites like I showed you for Planet Labs, yeah, you can see penguins, you can see walruses, you can see animals now.

Yeah, we've seen elephants in some of the imagery, we've seen some hippos and stuff, and that's blowing my mind. I totally recognize the giraffe, by the way, from that one slide. I knew it was a giraffe. You knew it was a giraffe? Okay, good. I did. So you're talking about all the advantages that have been achieved through the use of this technology, but

have there been any limitations? Has it really all been great? Hmm, that's a good question. Has anything been great? What's bad, you mean? What hasn't been achieved? What can't it do? Okay, yeah, so everybody wants to find species, they want to count tigers with satellite imagery, you can't do it. The tigers hide under the trees.

A lot of other species do that, everybody, people at work ask me all the time they want to count species with satellites, you can't do that. I probably can't tell you what types of trees there are, things like that, people always ask things like that, or also, like, why did something happen? I can tell you that this forest got cut down, I can tell you what's there now, but I really can't tell you why.

And so sometimes people try to, yeah, get into more of that. Oh, and I can't map happiness? Like, people, we want to map happiness, we can't map happiness. We can't map love. Can't map emotions, can't tell if someone's lying. Yeah, not yet, not yet. Well, okay, that's really interesting, but I just wanted to go back to the tigers.

Okay, you can't map tigers because of how they behave? Yeah, and so, and that's the thing, we even did, so for example in Africa we have all this high resolution data in southern Africa, and it's an area where we count lots of buffalo, and the satellite passes over at ten in the morning, and I'll tell you where most of the buffalo are at ten in the morning, they're hiding under the one little bit of shade

that's in the savannah, so that's why when the, if an animal hides under something, like, you're not going to see it, and so we can't see really through trees, and we can't see under trees, so when, yeah, when those buffalo come out under the water or whatever, or in the floodplain, and they, you know, they drink or whatever, then we can see them, but we can't, it's from above, so you can't really see, like,

around things. I mean, to be fair, it seems, it seems okay to assume you can only see what's there, or what's immediately visible. Exactly, so. Yeah, but where would you like to see the tech go from here? Hmm, definitely more affordable and more accessible, so we still buy a lot of satellite imagery, and it's kind of

expensive, I mean, it's a difficult thing, I know it costs a lot of money to make a satellite and launch it, so it's, of course you should pay those people for what they do, but I feel like more data should be available to people like us to make it more accessible, to do good things, right? I don't mind charging, like, the Pentagon should pay for money, the National Intelligence Agency

of the United States should pay, sorry, pay money for satellite imagery, let those people pay, but I think that people like us in civil society and people that are trying to do good should not have to pay a lot of money, or they shouldn't be limited by what's, what's available. And then the only thing that is also still a little bit limiting, I guess, is the, when you fly a drone and you have all that data, it's actually, it takes

like days to process the data, and that should go faster, we should be, we should be better than that. So yeah, so I'd like to basically see, yeah, more What slows it down, sorry, like what? It's just like our computers are limited, I guess, still It's computing power. It's computing power, it's just like, you know, I click the button and I go home and I come back the next day and it's still running, I feel like that should be

it should not be a problem these days, we should, we should have like more powerful computers like that, but yeah, I'd just like to see more, more access to data, and also the sad thing that's happening is a lot of countries are prohibiting drones, they get scared of them, right, and then of course people do stupid things with drones all the time. Someone flew a

drone into an airplane in Lusaka, and so now you can't have drones anymore. And those stupid people need to stop buying their drones around airports and let people like scientists fly drones legally and safely you know, and basically good for good, so I think it's really important that we try not to have too many laws against drones because

that's unfortunately limiting people before they even have a chance to embrace the technology or work with it. But isn't regulation then key to sort of limiting the bad human behavior around drones? So, yeah, exactly, I mean you do have to limit the bad behavior like, I go on, I'm on like some drone group on Facebook and these

people, they fly over like cities and people and beaches and like you're just not supposed to fly over people, like you could kill someone when your drone crashes there's so many people doing bad stuff and they're so like, they're just spreading it around on the internet, like that's bad. What the US does is that anybody who has a drone needs to register with FAA and they need to like take a small class

and basically if you're sitting at your house and someone flies a drone over you, you can complain and they'll say, oh well there's four people around you who have registered drones, let's see if one of them did it, and so you can kind of have a little bit more control and stuff, so I think that's actually a good thing and I think most people who buy a drone on Amazon, like my drone came with

no directions, there wasn't even a book, they just sent you to YouTube and I've crashed a million times Did you watch like a couple of tutorials? Yeah, I watched a video and I was like I don't know, I've played video games before, how hard can it be? But it's actually really hard to make up drones, it's the same. Yeah exactly, and it's actually going to be really

dangerous, there was, I saw some show where like the propellers can actually like slit your throat, so you can hurt people with drones and especially when they get really big like that, so yeah, so you've got to stop doing stupid stuff with drones and like teach people more, so I'm teaching my colleagues, my social media colleagues, and we have the digital, our photographer colleagues

how to safely fly drones and what good practice is and always fly with someone else, and you know, not out of sight and all that kind of stuff. I'd like to learn, maybe. I'll do a drone class, we just have to find somewhere we can fly it because you can't really fly it in Berlin like legally, so Well, you know, I'm sure we'll figure that out. Yeah, exactly, fly it inside

Yeah, you're talking about lots of people having access to drones and a lot of the conversation around sensors is just how ubiquitous they've become and how they will continue to become ubiquitous, so are we actually looking at a future where everyone can be a remote sensing specialist or everyone will be one? That's a great question. Actually, yeah, if you have a drone, you're basically a remote sensing specialist

so as soon as you take a picture of something from far away and use it that's exactly what you're doing, so yeah, maybe everybody will have my title in a couple of years. So I can also be a saliten fernen erkundungspezelisten without any of the training. Exactly. Just go on Amazon Just pick one up, yeah. That sounds like a great idea. I think we should open

up the floor to questions in a while, but first I wanted to know why was the peanut butter blue in that video? That's a great question. I was like, the prairie dogs aren't going to eat it if it's blue. I have no idea. It's been a while since I've had a jar of Skippy I think it had to do with the vaccine that was in there, but yeah, it was really weirder to see where it falls I don't know, maybe the explanation was something like ferrets like

blue or the prairie dogs like blue. I will write to Kristi Bly from the video and I'll ask her. I must know, yes. It doesn't look very appetizing. I wouldn't eat it. Thank you. So, yeah. Does anybody have questions for Arlie? Yes, please. We're almost there.

Oh, she's super excited, look. She's like, she's probably a saliten fernen kundspezelisten. It's probably my fault. I may have done that too early. Surprising everybody. Alright, I think that's better.

Hi, my name is Samira Herd. I'm actually doing my PhD with drones. I'm a communication engineer, so that's why I'm really excited to hear all these really nice applications that you talk about because basically in my field I feel like we are not given a lot of applications. We are really excited to develop drone systems, but

we don't hear too much input from, you know, those people who are really interested in this technology because, as you said, people are scared of drones. Yeah, hopefully I will talk about that more in my speech tomorrow. But my question is, are you maybe considering

working with some research groups about that because, like you said, there's the time when you're doing your visual coverage of an area and at that time maybe you can't find the wafelos or something like that, then you can maybe consider using thermal cameras or something like this. So kind of a technology that is maybe developed

already by researchers and maybe can make it faster for you to perform all what you want to do. For example, you said it's really hard to kind of analyze the pictures that you get and maybe this is already there because we already worked with this and we might have something to support you.

Similarly, like for example, if you want to go into the forest, like you said, it's harder to find the target the tigers because they're hidden, maybe you can have the drone technology already developed specifically for this kind of mission. I have a second question as well.

Okay, let's do the first question and then the second question. So I only showed you just the limit of some of the technologies. When I fly the drone as a satellite sensing specialist, I'm interested in mapping. So I do this kind of panning thing with the drone and then I create a 3D model which gives information on the canopy and the holes and so on. In terms of finding

species, so I don't really, I'm not super involved in finding species but a huge part of what that does is we do install camera traps, also thermal camera traps which are basically motion sensor detecting cameras. When something walks by it, the camera goes on and they're like camouflaged and hidden and we see poachers and we see

animals and so on. So we do use a lot of that and we use crowd sourcing a lot of times to identify. We put these videos and these pictures online and crowd people, anybody, citizen scientists can come and say oh that was a poacher and oh that's a chimp and not a gorilla. So yeah, so we do use a lot of stuff and we even just got visited by a university last week that they use terrestrial lidar which

is this like panning, it's like a little cylinder and they put it on the ground and it basically scans around and gives you this awesome 3D image like of the forest and they can analyze it and give you the structure and so on. So yeah, so we do use a lot of different things for species and for all these detections and a big one right now is the sound

taking old smart phones and putting them up and then they detect sounds and they can test birds and which species are there and how many species are there and also hearing gunshots of poachers and so on. So I only gave you a snippet of the technology but yeah, there's a lot and we do work a lot with universities. I was just at Duke University last month where actually I went to school and we had

a drone conference and there were about 50 people there from all around and we're building a lot of machine learning projects and so on and we work with Humboldt University here, Aberswald, lots of universities all around. But you can contact me for more ideas and more collaborations I guess, but you have another question right? So yeah, so that's

a whole universe. Just for orientation, who else has a question? Okay, so 1, 2, 3 Oh man, now I'm sorry I asked so many questions. This is a very short question. As you're working with this WWF, what do you think is going

to be the effect of using drones when you have like this ecosystem with birds and all because we experienced that birds were really threatened by these drones when we were flying them. So that's an excellent question because the company that makes my drone has like a YouTube channel and I get really crazy when I see they have these drones that like fly right over elephants

and right over giraffes and the giraffes are all running away and that's terrible They're like terrorizing these animals with drones. So we don't do that. When I fly the drone, I fly it at like 200 meters high. You can barely see it and you definitely don't hear it. But elephants are particularly scared of drones because they sound like bees and elephants are scared of bees and it's actually pretty

dangerous. If you scare 20 elephants and there's a village nearby, those people are going to be really upset when those elephants come trampling their houses and stuff. So part of the things, some of the things we discussed at this conference at Duke was actually some of these things like people were waking up bears with drones, right? They're like oh look a hibernating bear. Let me just fly this drone in this cave and wake it up

and it stresses animals out. Their heart rate goes up and this is part of this stuff of like people should stop doing stupid stuff with drones is that I don't want to see people like buzzing over a giraffe's head with a drone and so on. There should really be like a community of practice or like kind of some smart guidelines on what you should do. And you shouldn't fly over people either. I was in Malta for vacation, sunbathing

and this drone was flying over my head and I find that to be really annoying. I think drones should be really like for like far out in the wildlife away from people, away from things that they can damage and try to be as remote and as non-invasive as possible. Okay, next question. Janelle had a follow up with that. No, it was actually just more of a dumb comment.

I was wondering if the Bavarian pigeons ever looked at drones and thought oh that's automation taking my job away. Exactly. Yeah, probably. I know I would love to work with pigeons actually. Okay. They don't make noise. Yes, I'm amazed. Thank you. A great talk. And I'll tell my daughter about what a can do. A question

for her maybe. What was the most unexpected thing you found mapping with drones? With drones or just in general? Imaging. So with the imaging so there was one time somebody called me up from our Sri Lanka office and they're like hey there's a banana plantation in a national

park. I'm like there's no way there's a banana plantation in a national park. It's a national park. It's like Yosemite. It's like you know any national park. I'm like this is impossible. So I bought some images like some old images and then I bought a new image from like a couple months ago and there was a banana plantation in the national park. And this is

a park where there's elephants. There's like these fishing cats. There's all these cool species and this is a national park. What was crazier is that someone said they saw like the Dole logo on there and we're like no Dole is not getting its bananas from a national park. Well guess what Dole had a subsidiary who planted a banana like a big banana field. I can show you the images.

Huge banana fields in this national park. But the great thing was that we brought the images to court and they like we were able to shut down the plantation and it was all over the BBC news. You can read about it. So that was kind of unexpected. I was kind of hoping that I wouldn't see a banana plantation in a national park. Wow. How that happened? Yeah.

They like yeah. Don't ask. Things happen. Yeah. Next question. Hi my name is Felix. At the moment I'm trying to go to be a remote sensing specialist as well. Yes. A simple question is the WUWF are you doing some projects in Europe at the moment?

Yes. We do. So we have offices all over Europe and our Germany office actually does a lot of things in Bavaria. We have offices in Dessau, Strahlsund, Aussie and everything. So we do do a lot. You might have read about the wolf. We're doing a lot with wolf conservation, lynx conservation. So in sense of remote sensing at the end? Remote sensing

specifically. I've helped a little bit with we're doing some fishing analysis in the Aussie. So we use some data we work with the DLR actually to use some data to look at fishing nets. People that might have been abandoning their fishing nets and they kind of float around. You can see them.

And also we do track fishing vessels. You might have seen some of the stuff coming out of the Google ocean things but we have data that we can track boats and see where they are and see if people are up to fishy stuff. No pun intended. People are doing illegal things. So we do do some remote sensing in Europe and I talk with the French office, the way of France

cause I also have French and we do do cool work in French Guiana which is technically Europe. So yeah. Just happens to be in South America. Okay. Next question is over there. Yeah, you know the game. It's cool.

So it's always about standing up. Hi Arlie. Thanks for the talk and I'm really excited to have a conservation tech talk here also. And I'm wondering people are networking a lot like global innovation gathering we have all these innovation hubs, startup labs, maker spaces is there anything for you know

conservation and tech or tech for conservation that works in a similar way or is that something we should have or what do you think? How do you network globally? That's a good idea. I don't think we have anything like that because I'm sure A we can probably make really cool drones.

We actually had a school, I think it was a high school or young school, Hochschule in Berlin tried to come up with a solar powered drone so it could fly further which was really cool. I'm sure there's lots of cool stuff that can be done with camera traps. So those camera traps for example, like I worked in the United Arab Emirates, the UAE. There's a park

there that I was working with and they got to go set up these camera traps and you got to walk for like 8 hours in the hot sun and carry like 20 kilos of water and stuff to go set up these camera traps and when the battery dies you got to go back and get them. And I'm like why hasn't anybody figured out a way to like I don't know, make it more Wi-Fi connected or things like that or deliver them with drones

or something or find a better way to basically then send in these poor interns, they're interns that we send out there and they sweat and die to death. But I think there's a lot to be done. I don't know that much about it but I'm sure there's lots of cool technology. Some of those acoustic monitoring things

that I was telling you about, like with the old cell phones, that's someone's cool idea. But I'm sure there's a lot more. Let's organize something. Any other questions? So it's your chance, we still have time so if anybody wants to

repose a question or anything then it's your time. I'm sure I could have covered all of them. If no one has another question I'll ask another. So in your description it mentions that you're doing your PhD. You read my description. I read your description.

It's a personal question so feel free to avoid it. I'm wondering how that works for you as combining science and applied conservation and actually working and not going the usual route of doing your masters, your PhD, working and kind of getting it all

together. How does that work for you? Cool question. So I did get my masters right after my university degree and I had applied for a PhD program actually at the University of Maryland which is a killer remote sensing school and I think I was like 21 years old and I was walking around this school visiting and all the other

students were older and had kids and stuff and I just had this thing in my mind that was like wait I'm going to be 25 when I have a PhD and I will have never worked like a day in my life like a full time job like not counting like waiting tables and I was like okay and I had like internships or something and I was like I think I need to get some experience of like what's really happening in the world because

plus the stuff they were studying was just like totally ridiculous. We went into the forest with a rifle and we shot at the trees and then the bits of the trees came down and then you collected them and you compared the chlorophyll to what you got in the satellite image and I was like that's great but like what does this do for anybody? It didn't really like I didn't see the conservation perspective so I got a job

at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which is the American Ocean Service and that's where I did a lot of the coral reef underwater stuff and I learned so much there basically like how to order imagery and like how much it costs and how to present at conferences and how to write articles and like all that stuff was so useful and I think more than I would ever have learned

in a PhD and also like one thing when you take our gentleman, when you go to class at university and you study remote sensing they give you these beautiful images that never have any clouds. They're from like Boulder, Colorado or like San Francisco and you're like oh wow this is so easy it's great I can just you know click here and like I can analyze my image but in the real world

there's clouds everywhere and there's shadows and there's like all this other garbage and it's like impossible and they don't ever teach you that and so like I think that's where their real world was and so my first job I remember I actually spent six months like drawing around clouds because we didn't have a method to remove them and then you had to put the cloud and then move it over because that's where the shadow was and that's how you got rid of the clouds

and shadows like all by hand and so I think like that was actually really important and I decided to get my PhD because I work a lot with Humboldt University here in Berlin. They have a great geomatics program and I was just kind of meeting them and like I had all these ideas and actually the drone stuff and the Congo stuff is kind of part of my PhD so

I'm basically publishing papers and doing it while I work I don't have enough time to do any of it it's going to take me forever but when I do get the time like it's actually really cool to be able to do real sciencey stuff and publish articles and stuff but what the Humboldt loves is that I'm like one of the few people that actually has like applications right they have all these guys sitting behind computers that make algorithms

but we can actually use them like the stuff that I make you know we put it on globiel and people actually use the stuff and we can apply it and we can see what works and what doesn't work so it's actually kind of a cooler way to do science so I would say it's really important to get a job first and see what's out there before going back to school.

Someone else had a question or no? I think that's the last question right? She's checking the time so yeah. Or could you come Hello I would like to know I mean all the

all these images you take and all the data they are in the very end they serve to conservation of nature so when you see an infraction like the banana plantation you gave us that example when you see things like that they are reported to the government

or they are given to the press or how do you proceed? So yeah it really depends on the place yeah. And what are the results governments react when you close things down like that plantation you said? So that was a specific case where we had people that went to the to court and they brought like they basically

filed a complaint but you're right it really depends so I work in the Democratic Republic of Congo which is actually the least democratic country in the world and they don't want to know they don't want anybody to know that people are doing bad things and we need to be really careful especially we have offices in these countries so it's really difficult if I go

and I'm like hey look the government did this horrible thing you know here in the Congo and my office is there we could actually put them in trouble or put them in danger and so it's a little bit of a balancing act there's a lot of countries where it's really difficult and we need to be really careful Indonesia is another one where we can't just go out there and say that oh you guys are cutting

down all your forests and putting oil on plantations even though you can see it on Google Earth we have to be really careful about that so it's a lot of like working with the local offices and the local offices are the ones who are in touch with the government and who can kind of massage or help us determine what is allowed and what is not allowed and what's going to get us into trouble a lot so we

have to be really diplomatic so one of the things we say is that we're not like Greenpeace so Greenpeace is very vocal you know very climbing on buildings and naming and shaming and we try to be a little bit more democratic or diplomatic sorry to really kind of show people that they're doing something bad and show them how they can do better and not just like embarrass them and

make them look bad and so on because that's not really going to get you anywhere in the end so that's kind of how we do it so and it all depends whether it's a government or sometimes we'll maybe feed the information to Greenpeace or we'll feed the information to another NGO who will make lots of noise and bang the pots and pans but it really needs to be strategic because we're

an organization founded in science and so we really need to you know maintain our role as nice neutral clear scientists you know who are just sharing information so I hope that answers your question that sounds really pragmatic yeah we try but I guess Suzanne we're out of time yeah

maybe well okay I think we are in time and that's perfect thank you for the big I lost my words thank you for the big talk and thank you for your questions

thank you for your questions that was Janelle from the Deutsche Welle working as a journalist thank you for your talk about your satellite work and yes and now I want to announce the parties