Applications Invited for Innovation Challenge Version 2: Remote-Sensing Water Quality with Satellites

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About the Organization

Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI) is a nonprofit organization that works to improve the welfare of farmed fishes in India, a country that farms several billion fishes annually. FWI has primarily focused on improving the welfare of these animals by addressing issues like water quality and stocking density.

About the Grant

In December 2024, we launched an Innovation Challenge aimed at developing remote sensing technology to help us cost-effectively scale our programming to improve the welfare of many millions of fishes. We received 33 models from 10 different parties; unfortunately, no models met our minimum requirements. Despite this disappointment, we remain excited about this technology and believe the Innovation Challenge is worth one more try.

We are relaunching the Innovation Challenge. This time around, the financial rewards on offer have been raised significantly: up to USD 100,000.

The Innovation Challenge is now open.

The Problem: Limitations of Our Farmer Program

In FWI’s current main program, the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA), our team collects water quality data from member farms. If critical water quality parameters indicate that fishes may be exposed to poor conditions, our team provides farmers with recommendations for corrective actions.

The current ARA model requires FWI staff to physically visit fish farms to measure water quality. The scalability of this model is limited by its dependency on in-field measurements, which caps the number of farms FWI staff can visit each day. The scalability limits also reduce the overall impact and cost-effectiveness of the program, and we therefore want to determine ways to assess water quality without intensive in-field presence.

The Proposed Solution: Satellite-Based Remote-Sensing

Monitoring water quality using satellites may be one opportunity to remotely assess critical parameters and improve the scalability and impact of the ARA. Remotely monitoring water quality would allow data collection from member farms more frequently and with lower resource input. And with that, we could identify more instances where fish welfare is compromised. This technology also offers a potential mechanism to support many more farms, helping to cost-effectively scale the program.

Updated Innovation Challenge

Despite the previous Innovation Challenge not resulting in useful models, we remain excited about this technology and believe the Innovation Challenge is worth one more try. We are relaunching the Innovation Challenge, with some changes:

 

The financial rewards on offer have been increased significantly, with a prize of up to USD 100,000 on offer.

Previously, we did not provide parties with ground-truthed data to train their models; rather, the hope was that they would use existing datasets for training their models. This time around, we offer historical data from the ARA (collected from over 200 farms in Andhra Pradesh since June 2021) to parties interested in using this data.

As before, we are seeking interested parties to either:

• Develop new models allowing us to remotely monitor key water quality parameters at aquaculture farms in India through analysis of satellite data, or
• Share existing models that can be utilised for our purposes.

We will provide a financial reward—up to USD 100,000—based on the outcomes of our validation process.

Eligibility

This Innovation Challenge is open to anyone. We encourage submissions from technology companies, academic institutions, non-profit organisations, individuals/groups, or any party that has relevant experience that can be applied to this challenge.

How to Apply

Interested parties are invited to notify FWI that they have a model or models ready for validation by August 20th, 2025. The submission process does not require the submission of any code, merely a brief description of the model/s.

Full details of the Innovation Challenge can be found here.

For more information please check the Link

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Tags Food, Agriculture and Nutrition Innovations and Technology Rural Development Others