Unveiling wild animal populations secrets using satellite data Peter Fretwell, British Antarctic Survey, ptf@bas.ac.uk
Why Antarctica? Remote, unexplored, logistically difficult dangerous and expensive No obscuring vegetation, no terrestrial predators so no need for wildlife to hide = populations are poorly understood = populations have a high contrast with their surrounding environment
Emperor penguins Southern right whale
Early insight: Schwaller In a series of papers in the 1980 s led by M. R. Schaller, several Adélie penguin colonies in the Ross Sea were investigated using Landsat TM images. Schwaller et al 1989 Promising conclusions: that it should be possible to identify and count penguins by Landsat
Tests with whales Ron Abileah working for the US coastguard instigated the use of Very High Resolution (VHR) satellites to search for whales in 2001 Abileah et al. 2001 IKONOS 2 (resolution 1 m panchromatic 4 m colour) Simulated targets modelled and methods applied to humpbacks in Maui
Emperor penguins First tests in 2007 by scientists from Scripps Institute Used the panchromatic (greyscale) information from Qucikbird1 (0.5m resolution) Applies supervised classification to automatically identify areas of penguins Baber-meyer et al. 2007
As we have no firm understanding of the number of existing breeding (emperor penguin) colonies, we cannot estimate the size or trends of the global population of emperor penguins Barbara Wienecke 2009
Landsat satellite image, resolution 28.5 m per pixel of the Brunt Ice Shelf near Halley Station Fretwell et al. 2009
2009 estimate 25 known colonies, 10 suspected locations Today, using satellite imagery we have 53 precisely located colony locations
2012 An emperor penguin population estimate: The first synoptic census of a species from space
Turn areas into numbers using a regression plot from eleven sites where we had simultaneous ground or aerial photography counts and satellite imagery A robust regression and Monte Carlo analysis was applied to test the accuracy
Analyzed using a supervised classification based upon initial work by Barber-Meyer et al. 2007
New population figures Approximately doubled the previous population estimate Fretwell et al. 2012
New behaviour spotted Ice shelf Ice Cliff Sea Ice Ice shelf Sea Ice 1km
BAS DeHavilland Twin Otter 4 new colonies found by satellite imagery breeding on ice-shelves not sea-ice, confirmed by aerial survey
Guano search Adélie penguins Schwaller et al. 2013
Area estimate of and Adelie penguin colony at Mt Biscoe, East Antarctica Automated guano detection based on infra-red signal, but errors with false positives form other seabirds
Known penguin colonies Indentified by Spectral Angle Mapper From the original ~42 million pixels contained within the Landsat scene the SAM analysis restricted the image to 177 pixels, of these 95.9 % were at, or near, known sea-bird colonies Fretwell et al. In press
Adelie chick hatching in late December Chinstrap chick hatching late January
Trial of automatic classification from QuickBird2 VHR imagery RED: Adélie BLUE: Chinstrap Waluda et al. In press Ground data GPS outlines Dec 2006 Automatic classification from QuickBird2 VHR imagery, mid Jan 2010
Naveen et al. 2012 Chinstrap penguins from VHR satellite Deception Island WorldView2
LaRue et al. 2011 Weddell Seals Fretwell unpublished
Crabeater seal BAS
Elephant seals: McMahon et al 2014 using Google earth Also, masked Boobies: Hughes et al, 2011 using Google Earth
BAS Whales: Southern Right Whale imaged by the WorldView2 satellite
Whales: Southern right whale proof of concept study at Peninsula Valdes Fretwell et al. 2014
Using WorldView2 satellite imagery (resolution 50cm) we can detect whales
Automated detection of whales using satellite imagery
The future? WorldView3 31cm/40cm panchromatic 1.24 m colour and NIR (7 bands) 3.7 m SWIR (4 to 7 bands) Hyperspectral Collection of spectral libraries of guano Further investigations on whales
Questions? ptf@bas.ac.uk
Emperors on the Shackleton Ice- shelf descend an ice cliff around 100m high They breed on the ice shelf in years when the sea-ice is poor at the beginning of the breeding season