Webinar - Wildlife Tracker for Oceans: real-time assessment for marine fauna habitat with Phytoplankton hotspots

The "Wildlife Tracker for Oceans" is a geo-framework dedicated to the real-time assessment of Marine Protected Areas - MPAs. The software is able to retrieve live feeds from Satellite Constellations like Argos for animal tracking and Copernicus for ocean bio-physic data. Thanks to advances in geo-technologies the processing and visualisation of data can happen on the fly. 

Wildlife Tracker geo-framework is powered with a graphic interface that lets visualise the movements of marine megafauna with a real-time feed. Additionally, with the support of Blue-Cloud, it is possible to include the hotspot of Phytoplankton concentration, with different levels of depth. The geo-framework supports the assessment of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) delimitation based on meaningful spots of marine wildlife.

This project is dedicated to marine scientists who are willing to discover: 

1. How the Phytoplankton hotspots influence the marine megafauna movements.
2. To what extent the movements of marine megafauna and Phytoplankton concentration help the delimitation of MPAs.

Wildlife Tracker for Oceans is aiming for supporting the protection of marine megafauna based on real-time geospatial technologies and promoting marine spatial planning based on conservation efforts from anthropogenic threats.

With specialised users, the tool can help to the proper delimitation of MPAs including the meaningful spots of marine megafauna. It is known as meaningful to those places where hotpots of Phytoplankton overlap the marine megafauna movements. Our team is inspired by ocean life and pristine ecosystems! Focused on real-time wildlife monitoring, eager to create a geo-framework that supports the assessment of marine protected areas.

Discover this application in our webinar, featuring the experts who have designed and developed it, enhancing it thanks to the Blue-Cloud Hackathon 2022.

Target audience

• Marine Protected Area Managers
• Movement ecology researchers
• Marine scientists focused on conservation efforts
• Fishing planning authorities
• Water remote sensing professionals

The webinar welcomed attendees from key organisations in the marine domain, including UNESCO, SOCIB, CMCC, as well as in research, such as EPFL, CNR-ISTI, University of Salento, University of Aveira, Kyushu University.

Agenda

• 15:00 - Federico Drago, Trust-IT, Blue-Cloud communication manager - Brief introduction about Blue-Cloud and hackathon
• 15:10 - Bryan Vallejo, University of Tartu, MSc Geoinformatics - Wildlife Tracker for Oceans and Blue Cloud implementation 
• 15:20 - Sofia Green, Ghent University, MSc Marine-biological resources - Use case in Galapagos Islands
• 15:30 - Tran Ngo, University of Tampere, MSc Environmental Engineering - Blue economy model of Wildlife Tracker
• 15:40 - Promo video presentation
• 15:45 - Q&A