Ocearch monitors shark populations using the cloud

Ocearch is a research organization based in the United States, whose mission is to accelerate the return to balance of the oceans, through scientific and educational programs. She works with scientists around the world on monitoring populations of marine animals, particularly sharks. The feeding and migratory habits of these large predators are indeed good indicators for understanding the state of the seabed.

With its ship, the M/V Ocearch, the NGO carries out several scientific expeditions a year, during which animals are examined, measured and equipped with sensors that then allow them to be tracked during their movements: SPOT (smart position and temperature) tags , accelerometers, acoustic sensors. More than 400 animals are now tracked through the device. The data collected is uploaded by satellite and then sent to the AWS cloud. From this, the data can then be made available to nearly 200 scientists representing nearly 90 institutions.

Open source shared data

They are also shared in open source through the Ocearch Tracker application, geolocation data being displayed on maps provided by the geographic information systems publisher Esri. For its infrastructure, the organization uses S3 storage service, RDS database, EC2 compute service, and Route 53 to manage domain names. “The collaborative environment, enabled by AWS, provides access to previously inaccessible shark data and helps determine the overall health of the ocean, as well as informing fisheries management to be sustainable and to support public safety efforts,” says Fernanda Ubatuba, President and COO of Ocearch.