Malaysian scientists win second place in Commonwealth ocean innovation contest

 

A team of emerging scientists from Malaysia have won second place in an international ideas competition on ocean and climate challenges for their pitch on Marine Spatial Prioritisation and Habitat Analysis Toolbox, also known as “Martha’s Toolbox”.

Team Terangi - the team behind the ingenious idea - consisted of Safran Yusri and, who has a background in biology and information technology, alongside three other colleagues

Martha’s Toolbox aims to monitor environmental elements such as climate change and water quality while analysing potential threats in the ocean on a single technology platform.

Speaking at the final pitch event on Thursday (Oct 14), Safran said there were factors in spatial prioritisation that make it exhaustive and time-consuming.

“Our ocean is in crisis due to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, pollution, coastal development and climate change.

“Conserving the marine ecosystem is difficult. Conservation practitioners have to struggle with limited resources such as funding, time and personnel,” he said.

He said Martha’s toolbox was incepted to streamline the process and analysis.

The toolbox offers a better way to streamline analysis by boasting cloud-based tools on the web to avoid downloads and installations, an emphasis on conservation efforts by using available data and information, and time efficiency by using integrated data sources and pre-built scientific workflows.

The “Hack the Planet” ideas competition had opened on April 22 to people of all Commonwealth nations.

The competition sought to solve the challenges of the ocean, set out in the Commonwealth Blue Charter, by incorporating imagery, connectivity or other applications from satellites.

These challenges include coral reef protection and restoration, mangrove ecosystem and livelihoods, marine protected areas, and ocean and climate change, among others.

In first place was British creators of Plastic-i, a powerful tool for mapping ocean plastics with earth-observing satellites. It aimed to tackle marine pollution by combining satellite data with machine learning to create an open-source map of floating pollution, updated daily

Meanwhile, Loop Recyclers Tech from Nigeria won third place for their concept to use geospatial data to monitor and improve recycling rates for plastics, preventing them from reaching rivers and the ocean.

All three winners will share a prize pool of £20,000 (RM114,300) and over £85,000 (RM485,789) in satellite data and cloud computing services. - Mkini