IN THE NEWS

SmartPort Project to Collect Crowdsourced Sediment Data

The Lower Mississippi River SmartPort and Resilience Center project will collect crowdsourced sediment and shoaling data from eight ports along the Mississippi River to gain insights into obstacles affecting river traffic.

Jul 23, 2021


Ports along the Mississippi River in Louisiana will begin working with the Water Institute of the Gulf, an applied research nonprofit in Baton Rouge, to better understand shoaling dynamics — the movement of all of sediments — and create a technology tool to share the shoaling data with river operators and researchers.

The project, known as the Lower Mississippi River SmartPort and Resilience Center — or SmartPort — will establish what organizers are calling “America’s first smart port.” It will take depth and shoaling data collected by the many vessels on the river, like tug boats, barges and others, along with official survey-grade data, to develop a crowdsourced tool using artificial intelligence to help predict when and where shoaling will occur.

“We use artificial intelligence and machine learning to correct for the imperfections that we’ve collected from these working vessels, so that we create a virtual army of data collectors from the vessels that are working the river every day,” said Justin Ehrenwerth, president and CEO of the Water Institute.

“We’ve developed an app to harvest that data, beam it up to the cloud,” he added.

The two-year project received a $1.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, which was met with $1.4 million in matching funding from the state of Louisiana and other partners. The project will collect shoaling and sediment data from eight major ports along the Mississippi River stretching from northern Louisiana, near the Arkansas border, to the Gulf of Mexico.

The raw data will be made available publicly, allowing it to be used for other uses beyond the SmartPort application. The data can be used in other water-related projects, like the state’s sediment diversion program and other areas. Read the full story here.