9

LENS

UAV’s can provide similar capabilities as crewed

surveillance aircraft for a fraction of the cost. They

also present fewer barriers to entry.

Selbe’s lab is already testing the ability of fixed-

wing and multirotor drones to carry out aerial

surveillance missions in the Channel Islands

National Marine Sanctuary. “Drones will be good for

monitoring vessels,” he says, “because they can get

close enough to see what people are actually doing,

unlike satellites or high-altitude reconnaissance.”

The Australian UAV manufacturer, Aerosonde, has

also showcased the effectiveness of UAVs to track

illegal fishing vessels, and there have been successful

demonstrations of the application of drones for

everything from scientific research, to wildlife

protection, search and rescue, and firefighting.

“This tech has the opportunity to become a part of

our daily lives, but work needs to be done to make

sure that privacy protections, safety and robustness

are built into future platforms,” Selbe explains.

of survival, we can expand communication and
observation capacity efficiently and inexpensively.”
Selbe, who currently serves as the Southern
California Regional Representative for Engineers
Without Borders, left a position at Boeing Space
and Intelligence Systems as a spacecraft propulsion
engineer to pursue his career as a conservationist full
time. ”I felt like I was watching a lot of innovation and
opportunity being stifled by unnecessarily proprietary
designs and expensive solutions,” he says. “It
seemed like lots of the opportunity to change
the world was lost on people stuck in this broken
intellectual property system. It was in that frustration
that the open-source movement resonated with me.”
Selbe now runs a non-profit innovation lab in Los
Angeles called Conservify, where he develops open-
source technologies for conservation. In the last few
years, Conservify has built and deployed low-cost
conservation drones for coastal monitoring, open-
source environmental monitoring sensor networks
in the Okavango Delta, acoustic monitoring buoys in
the Pacific, seismic recording stations in Canadian
glaciers, and a water sampling robot in Peru’s Boiling
River. “Communities and non-profits are begging for
these types of solutions, and there currently exists
almost nothing out there.”

CONSERVIFY INNOVATION LAB
Conservify is the only innovation lab in the world
to focus exclusively on the development of open-
source conservation technologies. The lab aims to
use ‘openness’ as a means of battling environmental
crimes, while promoting cooperation within the
conservation community itself. Members believe
that when conservation-related data changes, from
something that only a privileged few can access to
an open resource for public good, incentives around
wildlife crime and over-exploitation can start to
change for the better.
One such project is SoarOcean. Although aerial
surveillance has been one of the most important
tools in monitoring our oceans, current approaches
rely on the use of military resources to provide both
the monitoring activities and enforcement of marine
protected areas. Utilising military resources in this
way often results in less than desirable coverage and
significantly high costs. According to Selbe, current or
decommissioned military-level aircraft, with rates for
surveillance missions running from $4000 to $40 000
per hour, are commonly used. Selbe and his team
believe that small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs),
including hobbyist drones, pose a better solution to
aerial surveillance over crewed surveillance aircraft.

The FishNET project was honoured as a

Buckminster Fuller Challenge Semi-Finalist,

Savannah Ocean Exchange Gulfstream

Navigator Finalist, and Katerva Award Nominee,

and eventually caught the attention of National

Geographic in 2013, who named Selbe as one

of their ‘Emerging Explorers’, in recognition of

his use of technology as ‘a ground-breaking

approach to ocean conservation’.

FISHNET

“I felt like I was watching a lot of innovation and

opportunity being stifled by unnecessarily proprietary

designs and expensive solutions”

Shah Selbe

Above

SoarOcean, Salbe’s

conservation drone

project, funded by the

National Geographic

Society and Lindblad

Expeditions, is a

partner to UAViators