Tactical Conservation

Professor Barbara Block is on a mission to conserve marine biodiversity. Her creative use of technology has transformed ocean research. In the late 1990s, she helped develop the first pop-up satellite archival tag—an ingenious device that detaches itself from the fish on a pre-programmed date and floats to the surface of the sea, where it transmits archived data via a satellite. She has also developed innovative electronic tagging techniques that enable her team to follow the movements of fish in the sea and Shark Net, a free app for for people to track sharks individually as the fish swim around America’s west coast. Block is currently trying to build a bigger picture of the marine world by setting up of a series of underwater listening stations. Together Block and her teams accelerate ocean research and conservation with scalable technological innovation, intelligent observation and data analysis, and open sharing of information...

Deep sea exploration today is inefficient, elite, and expensive. As a result, we don’t fully understand how to wisely use and protect the ocean, so that we may thrive today and into the future. Dr. Katy Croff Bell is on a mission to break down the barriers to the deep sea by combining low-cost technologies, AI-driven data analysis, and capacity building to make access to the deep sea more efficient and accessible to all, especially those traditionally underrepresented in the field. Her background in ocean engineering, maritime archaeology, and geological oceanography, and leadership of dozens of expeditions around that world uniquely position her to create efficient, equitable systems that can and should be developed in order to broaden access to the deep sea around the world.