Abandoned fishing gear, also known as “ghost nets,” account for nearly 30% of ocean plastic waste, silently drifting and trapping marine life. Locating them has long been a nearly impossible task until now. With partners like WWF Germany, we’re using AI to help locate them so divers can remove them.
🗺️ The approach: GhostNetZero.ai uses AI trained on sonar data to flag likely locations of ghost nets, turning a near‑impossible search into action.
🤝 The partnership: WWF Germany’s field expertise combined with innovation from Microsoft is helping to transform AI signals into safe recovery missions.
🌊 The impact: So far, WWF Germany has recovered over 33 tons of ghost nets from the Baltic Sea.
Learn more: https://lnkd.in/dKTc2ePP
Ghost Nets are unintentionally lost fishing gear. They are found on the open sea or in the waters. It's still passive fishing. Fishes are swimming in because no one comes there to pick it up again. Before 2018 I was very unhappy because we didn't find the Nets. I was reading about creation and his work and actually the technology he's using. Sidescan sonar technology gives us the possibility to search on huge areas for this lost ghost Nets. Because I started 40 odd years ago, I got to get involved in searching for a lot of different items, planes, trains, Subs, Nets. When the Columbia Space Shuttle was lost, I was contacted and finding the black box. My failure rate is typically less than 5%. Birds about sidescan sonar is superhuman eyes. Eyes that can't find Nets designed to be invisible in the water. Detecting a ghost net is all about pattern recognition, and if we find something like here, I mark it. Some people you just couldn't teach to do it. Period. Now with Microsoft AI, with the Ghost Net Zero AI, we can scale his knowledge. So we are always looking for partners and we have had an amazing problem that is trying to look for ghost Nets in the ocean. An expert human can find a ghost that from a sonar, but it's challenging and he would take hundreds of years to go through all of these sonar data and review it. So with the. Eye wie Just Multiply Cratan in der in der East World. In order for us to have an impact, we need these ghost Nets being retrieved so that relationship between divers and us is critical. Without that relationship, this doesn't work. There were a lot of small groups working together on one problem and everybody puts their power together then maybe this problem will be solved in the future. I need to be optimistic. I have two kids. I want that they see nature, that they see ocean. Then we have to care for that. I hope we can show that the connection between persons which see the actual problem and the tech world can help us to solve more problems for our planet.
