Satellites, drones, and AI
Designing effective environmental policy and management requires understanding how, where, and why ecosystems are changing. New technologies, such as remote sensing using satellites and drones, can be leveraged to monitor environmental change at scale.
In my PhD thesis, I developed conceptual and analytical tools to advance the study of coastal environments, with a specific focus on island-reef systems in the South Pacific and the Caribbean. Leveraging physics-based modeling and probabilistic AI, I developed a novel satellite algorithm for estimating the concentrations of key water quality constituents (e.g., phytoplankton and suspended sediments) in shallow reef environments from remotely sensed optical data.
I led two field campaigns in the South Pacific to collect ground-truth data. See below for photos from the field!
Measuring the spectral signatures of corals: fieldwork in Mo’orea, South Pacific, in 2023. Credit: Courtney Stuart 
Fieldwork in Mo’orea, South Pacific, in 2023. Credit: Courtney Stuart 
Drone survey of the coral reefs: fieldwork on Tetiaroa, South Pacific, 2022. Credit: Rosalie Wright 
Fieldwork on Tetiaroa, South Pacific, 2022. Credit: Rosalie Wright
Read more in my open access publication:
- Palola, P., Theenathayalan, V., Schröder, C., Martinez-Vicente, V., Collin, A., Wright, R., Ward, M., Thomson, E., Lopez-Garcia, P., Hochberg, E., Malhi, Y., & Wedding, L. (2025) Simulation-based inference advances water quality mapping in shallow coral reef environments. Royal Society Open Science, 12, 12241471. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241471
All the code and data are open source and freely available:
- Palola, P. (2024). SBI_marine_remote_sensing. Open Science Framework. https://dx.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PCDGV
This work was supported by the Bertarelli Foundation as part of the Bertarelli Programme in Marine Science and the Osk. Huttunen Foundation.