These Brilliant Nets Don’t Just Glow in the Dark — They’re Saving Sea Turtles’ Lives

Adult sea turtles may have few natural predators — unless you factor in human beings. 
One of the many threats to sea turtles, as well as dolphins, whales and sea lions, are gillnets. A gillnet is a wall of netting suspended in the water (imagine a tennis net strung along the bottom of the ocean). Fishers aim to trap fish, not other marine animals, but gillnets don’t discriminate, and those unintentionally caught animals are called bycatch.
With nearly all sea turtle species endangered, it’s become a priority for scientists and conservationists to find solutions to reduce sea turtle bycatch.
The sheer number of fishers underscores the problem: Off the coast of Indonesia, there’s an estimated 300,000 small-scale vessels that fish in those waters. In Peru, it is estimated that 100,000 kilometers of gillnet is set each year along the coast. Even in the United States, along the coast of North Carolina, fishermen are casting gillnets into the ocean and hauling back entrapped animals. 
“A mind-boggling amount of fishing effort goes on in that very small interface between humanity and our oceans,” said John Wang, who leads gillnet bycatch research at the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center.
Scientists are turning to lights to help solve the problem.
By attaching an LED light every 10 meters on the net’s float line, turtles are able to see the gillnets more easily. 
“[We’re] not scaring turtles. The lights aren’t making the turtles annoyed or anything,” Wang said. “What we’re doing is we’re increasing their awareness that something odd is going on.”

One promising bycatch reduction technology: LED lights to illuminate gillnets.

By increasing the turtles’ awareness of their immediate surroundings, they tend to avoid the nets.
Research indicates the lights are working. Illuminated gillnets have decreased sea turtle bycatch without decreasing target catches. 
Studies in Mexico found green sea turtle bycatch reductions between 40 and 60%. Researchers in Indonesia showed that green, olive ridley and hawksbill sea turtle bycatch was reduced by 60% and the target catch increased. And in Peru, illuminated nets have reduced green sea turtle bycatch between 65 and 80%. Collaborators have also expanded research out to areas in Pakistan, Ecuador, Italy, Slovenia and Ghana. 
“Even though mom and pop fisherman in Mexico might be fishing a kilometer to two kilometers of net, boy, there’s a lot of [people] fishing one or two kilometers,” Wang said. “And it quickly adds up to a scale that’s comparable, if not more, than some of the industrial fisheries.”
Illuminated gillnets can help these “mom and pop fishermen.” When a turtle or other animal gets tangled in the nets, fishers spend time, money and effort untangling and repairing the nets. By adding lights, an illuminated gillnet, in theory, reduces these efforts. 
“That’s not to say that there isn’t a cost associated with these lights,” Wang said. Researchers are working in both developed and developing countries, so funding for these lights isn’t always easy to come by. Scientists are working with conservation groups, like WWF, along with government entities to support subsidies for lights.
For example, in Indonesia, WWF collaborated with the Ministry of Fisheries to adopt lights into its management plan. And the government is now looking at developing its own LED light industry.
John Wang, who leads gillnet bycatch research at the NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, deploys an illuminated gillnet off the coast of Indonesia.

“LED lights for fishing, they’re already there,” Wang said. “It’s a matter of getting the pricing down, making them more sustainable through some of the solar technology we’re working on, and creating the supply chains so that fishermen in these remote places actually have access.”
At Arizona State University, biologist Jesse Senko is working with NOAA to power lights with solar technology. And other scientists are looking at how colored lights might maximize bycatch reductions.
Beyond just sea turtles, illuminated gillnets can potentially reduce bycatch in other species like cetaceans, which include species like dolphins; and elasmobranchs, which include species like sharks and rays.
“And now you have a single tool that can be fairly influential across multiple taxa of animal,” Wang said. “That helps these small-scale fisheries become that much more sustainable for the long run, and that’s ultimately what’s important.”
More: Shark Week Has a Gender Problem. These Women Scientists Are Trying to Fix That
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the whales are elasmobranchs. Additionally, Peru has an estimated that 100,000 km of gillnet is set each year, not Northern Peru. NationSwell apologizes for the errors.

Could One Parking Lot Feed a City? They’re Betting on It

In a parking lot in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, there’s a 20-acre farm. But there’s no soil or tractors in sight. Instead, 10 bright white shipping containers occupy the asphalt.
The lot is contested space in a major city like Brooklyn. But Square Roots isn’t using it for parked cars. It’s using the space to grow herbs. The company has deliberately chosen the middle of an urban environment, and its goal is to feed the city that surrounds it.
“We’re literally in a parking lot of an old Pfizer pharmaceutical factory. We’re across the road from the Marcy [housing] project. We’re within a subway ride of 8 million people in New York,” Tobias Peggs, a co-founder of Square Roots, told NationSwell.
Square Roots, a vertical farming company, runs its operation out of the refurbished containers. Its goal is to make local food accessible to everyone.
A lack of fresh produce is a major problem for many residents in urban areas like New York, where over 16 percent of the population is food insecure. And for those who do have access to fresh produce, chances are it traveled hundreds of miles before ending up at the grocery store.
This leads to a variety of problems. People living in food deserts generally rely on processed foods and have higher health risks than those who can afford weekly trips to Whole Foods. Transporting vegetables and fruits around the world has a hefty carbon footprint and nutritional values quickly diminish after produce is picked.
And as the world’s population grows to 10 billion by 2050, our food output will need to drastically increase — by an estimated 70 percent, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Square Roots’ founders think they may have found a solution to the aforementioned problems.
“Rather than shipping food from one part of the planet to the next, what if you could just ship environmental data?” Peggs asked. “And recreate climates from all over the world, but recreate those climates in your backyard.”
Square Roots relies on technology to create each crop’s ideal environment in every container. The humidity, temperature, water and light are all controlled. The farms are connected to the “cloud,” which provides accurate, real-time information on each crop.
And the setup is yielding results. When Square Roots first grew basil it took 50 days. Now the growth cycle is just 28 days. By tracking light, heat and water, it can adjust each variable and create the conditions under which each crop grows best.

Tobias Peggs dives into the technology behind Square Roots’ operations.

Once a month, Square Roots invites people from across New York’s five boroughs to look inside the business’s operations. Visitors trickle in, and I watch as they munch on the 28-day-grown basil, chives and mint while learning about Square Roots’ operation.
“We picked them yesterday,” a farmer said.
After a quick overview of the program, we head outside for the main attraction a peek inside the farm.
Peggs commands the crowd. Eager for the big reveal, he opens the heavy, metal doors. A pink glow cascades over us energy-efficient light that helps the herbs grow.
Peggs dives into the science. “Basically, when you study photosynthesis, plant growth, the plant doesn’t absorb the full spectrum of white light. The plant only absorbs certain spectrums of light. A lot of red and a lot of blue. What we’re able to do in the farm is really control that light spectrum and only give the plant the spectrum of light that it needs.”
Efficiency is at the core of Square Roots’ operations. Besides refurbishing old shipping containers, each farm uses 90 percent less water than a similarly sized outdoor farm. There’s no soil; instead, the plants are fed nutrient-rich water. The containers also boast energy-efficient LED lights, and there are rumors of adding solar panels to power them. The produce is then biked to grocery stores across Manhattan and Brooklyn, which cuts back on emissions from transportation.
The result is a higher yield with fewer resources. Currently, the farms grow herbs, like mint, basil and chives; and greens, like romaine, gem and Tuscan kale. Peggs says the farms can grow practically anything. Strawberries, eggplants, beets, radishes and carrots are on its horizon.
But the catch is that each type of produce has unique energy requirements. One of the main criticisms of vertical farming is its lack of variety. Most vertical farms focus on lettuces and herbs because those greens have the largest output and highest profitability. Denser crops require more sunlight. That means more energy, and therefore, higher costs and more emissions.
Paul Gauthier, an associate research scholar at Princeton and founder of the Princeton Vertical Farming Project, researches vertical farming’s sustainability.
“In terms of carbon emission, it’s actually better to have your lettuce transported from California to New York if your [vertical farming] energy is coming from any fossil fuel,” he told NationSwell. “The energy consumption in a vertical farm in New York would be so high that you would produce more CO2 for lettuce than you [would] if you ship it from California.”
But if the energy is coming from renewable sources, then vertical farming is a competitive player.
It comes down to fueling these farms with the right energy and using efficient light.
Gauthier believes that vertical farms and other small, high output farms will be a key factor in feeding the world — but only if the crop variety grows.
“We won’t feed the world with lettuce,” he said.
A farmer harvests basil in Square Roots’ vertical farm.

But there’s debate on whether these ventures are affordable or realistic.
For example, Square Roots’ lot in Brooklyn cost about $1.5 million to build, which was funded by Peggs, the former CEO of Aviary, a photo-editing program, and Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk’s little brother, who sits on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX. So the idea that shipping container farms are scalable feels a little out of reach for the average person or company.
But the cost hasn’t deterred interest. This year Square Roots partnered with Gordon Food Services, which is the largest food distribution company in North America. This partnership will put Square Roots containers across the country.
Even as the company scales, it won’t reach every demographic. A $3 an ounce, basil isn’t something that’s going to solve America’s food deserts.
Peggs stressed that we’re just not there … yet.
“The reality today is that we’re right at the beginning of the technology road map here. Right at the beginning.”
Square Roots isn’t the only private urban farming company that’s professing scalability. Urban farms, such as AeroFarms and Bowery Farming, are currently attracting lots of attention for their potential to make local food available to everyone. According to AgFunder, agriculture-tech startups raised $16.9 billion in support in 2018. And investors, like Google Ventures and IKEA, have poured millions of dollars into supporting those initiatives.
And urban farming is likely to take root in the coming years. A study published in 2018 on Earth’s Future, found that if urban farming is fully implemented around the world, it could account for 10 percent of the global output of legumes, roots and tubers and vegetable crops — 180 million tons of food every year.  
“Not only could urban agriculture account for several percent of global food production, but there are added co-benefits beyond that, and beyond the social impacts,” Matei Georgescu, a co-author of the study, told City Lab.
Peggs and Gauthier agree that there isn’t one clear cut solution. Instead, it’s going to take a combination of urban and traditional farming to feed the world in the future.
“The very clear position here is that the more of us working to get people connected to locally grown food the better,” said Peggs.
More: Five Apps for the Tech-Savy Environmentalist

How a Cannon Could Save the Wild Salmon Population

The advent of hydroelectric dams has disturbed the crucial upstream migration of wild salmon for years. But a company called Whooshh Innovations aims to change that.
Their Salmon Cannon is derived from technology originally designed to assist apple and pear pickers in Washington’s orchards. The “cannon” is really just a tube lined with a “soft material [that] creates a seal around them, generating a vacuum effect that transports [the fish] through at 11-22 mph.”
Protecting the precious cargo is a system of baffles that keep the salmon from banging into the sides of the tube. The end result — launching the salmon upstream and up to 30 feet in the air — has passed safety tests at multiple sites.
Of course, this isn’t the first human effort at assisting salmon in bypassing manmade river-obstructions in their mating waters. Everything from ladders and elevators to trucks and even helicopters has been tried and proved expensive and inefficient.
Of the cannon, however, Washington’s Dept. of Fish and Wildlife Greg Haldy says, “It’s hard to tell, its early in the year, but it seems to be working way better than what we had in the past, way more efficient and I think it’s more fish-friendly.”
The salmon can be loaded by hand and even have demonstrated a willingness to enter the transport tube on their own.
The company’s very own Todd Deligan sums it up nicely: “Worldwide, there is the need to transport fish, whether they be live or dead, differently and more efficiently.”
From where we’re standing, it doesn’t look like a problem anymore.
[ph]

The Giant Seawall That Will Protect New York City

Every New Yorker remembers the harrowing pictures of cars floating at the entrance of the Carey Tunnel, the submerged subway stations and the decimation of Breezy Point. To protect New York City from the next big weather event, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) held a Rebuild by Design contest to find the best ideas to protect the vulnerable New York/New Jersey floodplain.
One of the winners (which will receive a federal grant of $335 million)? A concept called “The Big U.”
The Big U is almost exactly what it sounds like: a giant protective infrastructure project that would wrap “around Manhattan from West 54th street south to the Battery and up to East 40th street,” according to the Rebuild by Design website.
The Bjarke Ingels Group, an international design architectural firm that designed the Big U, is thinking big — envisioning more than just a seawall, but an entire system that doubles as a series of park and community areas, each tailored to a coinciding neighborhood.
According to the Verge, the Big U will also includes “a raised stretch of land known as the Bridging Berm acts as a natural dam, but also provides recreational green space for residents in the neighborhood” on the Lower East Side. A seasonal market placed under a raised section of the FDR could be shuttered from rising waters by panels that flip down to create a flood wall.
The White House has already designated another billion dollars for similar disaster relief ideas. In June, President Obama announced the National Disaster Resilience Competition, which invites “communities that have experienced natural disasters to compete for funds to help them rebuild and increase their resilience to future disasters.”

Here’s a Number That Will Change How You Think About Solar Power

This is big. A new report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found that in October of this year, 72.1% of all the country’s new utility-scale electrical generating capacity came from solar power. “This is truly astonishing, not to mention historic, and should serve as a reminder to everyone in Washington and in state capitals that smart public policies — such as the solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC), net energy metering (NEM) and Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) — are paying huge dividends for America,” the Solar Energy Industries Association said in a statement.