SkyTruth Lately

 
Wondering what SkyTruth has been up to lately?  Here’s a quick rundown:

Pearl Award

• We were honored to receive the 2014 Jean and Leslie Douglas Pearl Award, given to those “dedicated to improving the lives of others and to providing a sustainable earth for future generations.”

Pollution – Oil and Gas – Fracking

• MSNBC interviewed us for a story on the chronic Taylor Energy oil leak in the Gulf.
• Associated Press interviewed us for an in-depth story and video featuring our work monitoring and documenting chronic oil pollution in the Gulf of Mexico associated with offshore oil and gas development; covered in major media outlets including Seattle Times, Houston Chronicle, Washington Post. Followup action resulted almost immediately as Senator Nelson demands more information from federal agencies.
• North Dakota regulators are finally cracking down on excessive, wasteful flaring of natural gas from oil wells. We’ve worked to provide daylight on this issue in a variety of ways, including our global flaring map and dataset.
• Our testimony, meetings with regulators, and public critiques regarding the public disclosure of chemicals used in fracking are having a positive effect, as some significant improvements were recently announced.

Coal – Mountaintop Removal

• We worked with Appalachian Voices to create an interactive map showing communities at risk from continued mountaintop removal mining.

Fishing – Ocean Monitoring

• We detected a vessel fishing illegally in Palau’s waters and provided real-time, hot-pursuit support that helped Palau intercept the culprits in the nick of time, far out at sea. NPR covered the story.
• Yale360 wrote about our work on the Global Fishing Watch project with Oceana and Google, analyzing big data to map fishing activity throughout the ocean and illustrate how well – or poorly – marine protected areas are being managed.

Skytruthing

• Fast Company profiled our work, highlighting the “watchdog” role that satellite image monitoring can play in encouraging better performance by government and industry.
• This article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette describes our FrackFinder program of crowdsourcing to engage citizen-scientists in analyzing imagery and producing useful data.

Partnerships – Events

• We gave a presentation on our vessel-tracking work at a meeting attended by dozens of representatives from federal government agencies.
• We participated in a roundtable discussion at the Center for a New American Security focused on developing information-sharing platforms for large areas of interest to multiple nations.
• On May 19 we’ll give a presentation at a workshop hosted by National Geographic, NOAA and the State Department on monitoring and enforcement strategies for marine protected areas.
• In June we’ll be at the Economist World Ocean Summit in Portugal to present progress on Global Fishing Watch, including some research results, with our Oceana and Google partners.