Seagate Storage Takes Flight

Insights from massive unstructured data sets can better our planet’s wellbeing. Take Jennifer Fowler’s team. As assistant director of the Montana Space Grant Consortium (MSGC), a NASA higher education program, and director of University of Montana’s Autonomous Aerial Systems Office, she’s busy developing a system for using drones to gather wildfire data, which can be used to help combat the blaze, guide evacuations and direct emergency resources.

Then there’s Jason Hanlon of the Nature Conservancy, a frequent collaborator with Fowler, whose own team uses drones to study population counts of sage grouse. As a species native to sagebrush territory, their numbers speak an inordinate amount about the ecosystem’s wellbeing and serve as a litmus test, indicating where to direct care.

Although the two teams had often worked together in the past, this time around they did not so much connect over science — but geeked out over data storage. The latter, they learned, can advance the former.

Current solutions simply weren’t working. Fowler’s researchers were tasked with uploading massive volumes of data to the cloud — something that could take hours upon hours. Not exactly an ideal setup for gathering real-time insights about natural disasters like wildfires. For Hanlon’s bird counting project, slow external drives meant idle hours in the field, and lesser-quality drives meant the potential for data loss — a scenario that, unfortunately, he was all too familiar with.

Armed with the ability to move drone data from edge environments back to their offices in a fast, secure, efficient way, Fowler and Hanlon’s teams were able to propel their studies forward exponentially. For Fowler, that meant tapping into real-time data analysis which would contribute to battling forest fires. For Hanlon, it meant he could lean into algorithms and reduce the potential for human error when it came to counting sage grouse and, ultimately, many other species as he continues expanding his work to other ecosystems.

And for both teams, the potential for data loss in the field dramatically reduced while the potential for long-term data analysis increased tenfold.