Sometimes , flowers can be the villain . urine jacinth , with their apparently harmless reddish blue petals and profuse unripened leaves , have invaded tropical parts of Central Africa , including Benin . In Lake Nokoué in Cotonou , near the country ’s populous central coast , the hyacinths threaten to take over . In the last few decade , they have spread into dense colonies that block sunlight , crowd out aboriginal plants and wildlife , clog the watercourse and irrigation canals , and hinder villager as they judge to move and collect Pisces .
Danielle Wood thought that quad engineering could be part of the solution . In 2017 , soon after proceed from a task at NASA to MIT , she attended a conference where she encountered a Beninese entrepreneur who invited her to visit and explore how orbiter information could help oneself local radical manage the invasive sens . Today Wood is the director of the Space enable research group at MIT ’s Media Lab , and she was part of a team that just release their finding in the journal Frontiers in Climate , showing how Earth observation technologies can map and monitor knockout - to - reach area to inform local decisionmaking , specifically on how Beninese groups are tackling the hyacinth job with data from satellite , drone , and sensors in the lake .
Ufuoma Ovienmhada , a PhD student in Wood ’s group , led the project and work with Fohla Mouftaou , a Beninese Dr. and managing director of the company Green Keeper Africa . Mouftaou does not want to get disembarrass of the water hyacinths , which uprise in the Amazon basin in Latin America , he would rather make better utilisation of them in his community . The flower can actually be transform into an constitutional roughage that is effective at absorb crude - based pollutants and can be used to clean up oil wasteweir or surfaces contaminated with oil , acids , and paint . Green Keeper Africa rent hundreds of people in the area , including cleaning woman who live near the lake , to pile up the hyacinths and make them into the vulcanized fiber . First , however , they need to know where to focus their harvesting efforts .
Ovienmhada had fly a drone quadcopter over and around the lake to collect eminent - resolution photos of where and how fast the hyacinths are originate , but she was limited by where she could navigate it and how long the barrage lasted . orbiter data was more comprehensive . The squad collected images of the whole area in seeable and near - infrared wavelengths , as well as radio detection and ranging data with radio set and microwaves . Then she compared it to NASA orbital images going back to 1980 . “ The really cool matter about satellite data , compared to other method acting , is that satellite information is large - scale and has a farseeing historical archive of imagery . We were capable to canvass drift in water hyacinth growth , ” Ovienmhada says .
Read the complete clause atwww.wired.com .
Frontpage photo : © Weera Prongsiri | Dreamstime
