Chesapeake Bay Oyster Monitoring
Northrop Grumman Innovates Remote Monitoring of Bay Oyster Reefs Through Environmental Partnership
Northrop Grumman Innovates Remote Monitoring of Bay Oyster Reefs Through Environmental Partnership
Oyster restoration is key to the health of the Chesapeake Bay, as oysters are vital in helping clean water and restoring the bay's natural ecosystem.
Unfortunately, the bay oyster population has declined for over a century. In response, The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) supports a regional goal to plant 10 billion new oysters by 2025.
One of the primary challenges is remotely monitoring oyster reefs across the Chesapeake Bay. Only a fraction of reefs are monitored, and the CBF's current methods of gathering data are labor intensive and limited by weather and water conditions.
In partnership with the CBF, Northrop Grumman launched the Chesapeake Bay Oyster Monitoring Grand Challenge. Through the Challenge, employees developed technology solutions for remote oyster reef monitoring that leveraged the best of our remote sensing capabilities and applied them to low-cost commercial hardware in an effort to improve conservation programs.
Requirements for monitoring included:
Five teams were selected to develop and demonstrate sensor technologies. Those teams were then reorganized into two with a continued focus on developing and integrating the sensors onto vehicle platforms and demonstrating remote operation. The teams worked in parallel to field their concepts and delivered an operational capability to the CBF. The teams developed solutions that met the parameters of the CBF’s budget using:
Northrop Grumman is in the process of handing over the system to the CBF so they can continue to track oyster populations and the health of oyster reefs in the bay.
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