How do we protect our oceans?

Chris Smith asked marine biologist Liberty Denman...

Liberty - It's a very good question and a very daunting task as you say. It's something that's also thrown about a lot more in the media. People are talking about it, everyone's becoming a bit more environmentally aware, particularly for our oceans, which definitely suffer with the 'out of sight, out of mind' situation. And also, as you said, the fact it covers 71% of our planet, it's a very big space to try and monitor. I think a huge answer to that is actually coming from the technology space. I'm a really big believer in having collaboration between sectors and between countries. If we're going to solve a problem that big, you need to have collaboration. And I really think that AI and unmanned technology has got a really big role to play here because fundamentally AI can accelerate our ability to understand ocean dynamics, collect data and, again, that data can have all sorts of applications and it has all sorts of weird and wonderful use cases from being able to be applicable for processing habitat mapping data, which allows us to do so more quickly, to understand what's actually there because we can't protect it if we don't know what's there, also to produce models for populations. Illegal fishing and bycatch presents a real issue for sustainability and fish stocks, and using AI and cameras on boats instead of having human observers, which is also historically quite a dangerous job depending on who you're doing it for, this provides a technology that will figure out and identify species that have been brought onto deck on which undoubtedly at some point will be a protected species or too much of something. And this technology can actually identify that quicker and faster for us. Which, again, it's all just saving people power because otherwise it's difficult to do it on that mass