#dronesforgood — A blog on drone awesomeness — The Plastic Tide

Dear fellow Steemians! After seeing a great post recently by @thegreens I felt that as part of my work for the environment, i'd start blogging now and again about how drone technology is being used to help the it :) - Environmental optimism!

My first case study is a group of people that have decided to do their own thing and use drones for good. That is Pete Kohler’s and his organisation 'The Plastic Tide’. TPT is a small and positive social movement of people that get together (they are also supported by Surfers Against Sewage and surely others) to clean beaches across the country, however first a drone is sent up to produce a high quality map the beaches. This imagery is analysed using a machine learning algorithm, to automatically pick out the rubbish to produce real on the ground scientific stats. This machine learning evolves because of people, ‘citizen scientists’. Citizen scientists log on to the website and help train the algorithm by manually picking out and labelling plastics and other rubbish on the imagery. This is a great concept as it engages the public and the field science has the benefit too of having the data, which is open to the public and totally transparent. Many man hours have been ploughed into this from volunteers (over 10k at time of writing) globally and the project has received some very favourable attention.

Why don’t you get involved and tag some garbage? The project is 32% complete so more help is needed! Tag it!

I really like this project as this is a topic that has been on my mind since I was growing up wondering why the beaches were dirty (I thought it was bad then, its obviously much worse now) — thanks to organisations such as The Ocean Cleanup for taking this matter seriously. TPT are getting people together, there is a bit of entertainment watching the drone do its thing and then time to clean! Also, where many beach cleans do only just that, clean, TPT collect data and make that open source, something that is rarely observed as organisations tend to cling tightly to their data. This data could well be used for scientific study and to influence policymakers to enable change. That would be nice.

Next time you are at the beach, or on a walk and you see some rubbish, feel good about picking it up, and if anyone sees you doing it, I will bet that they will nod and show gratitude at you for doing so :)

I hope this post has been interesting and would love to hear from you via comments below. Please ask any questions, share any stories or reference other projects that we might be interested in too :)