Sky Truth
Sky Truth
Want to make a donation using Daffy?
Lower your income taxes with a charitable deduction this year when you donate to this non-profit via Daffy.
Do you work for Sky Truth? Learn more here.
By donating on this page you are making an irrevocable contribution to Daffy Charitable Fund, a 501(c)(3) public charity, and a subsequent donation recommendation to the charity listed above, subject to our Member Agreement. Contributions are generally eligible for a charitable tax-deduction and a yearly consolidated receipt will be provided by Daffy. Processing fees may be applied and will reduce the value available to send to the end charity. The recipient organizations have not provided permission for this listing and have not reviewed the content.
Donations to organizations are distributed as soon as the donation is approved and the funds are available. In the rare event that Daffy is unable to fulfill the donation request to this charity, you will be notified and given the opportunity to choose another charity. This may occur if the charity is unresponsive or if the charity is no longer in good standing with regulatory authorities.
About this organization
Mission
Sharing the view from space to motivate people to protect the environment. The nonprofit environmental watchdog uses satellite imagery and remote sensing data to identify and monitor threats to the planet's natural resources. Areas of focus include issues such as offshore drilling, oil spills, hydraulic fracturing, mountaintop removal mining, and illegal fishing. SkyTruth releases all of its imagery and data to researchers and the public for free, with the goal of greater transparency, motivating individuals, policymakers, governments, and corporations towards more responsible stewardship of the global commons.
About
2018 990 SERVICE ACCOMPLISHMENTSOceansSkyTruths monitoring of the 14-year old Taylor Energy oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico led to real action in 2018, when the US Coast Guard finally ordered Taylor Energy to fix the leak or face a daily $40,000 fine. We first discovered this spill while monitoring the BP oil spill in 2010. Since then, weve published dozens of satellite images of the Taylor slick over the years, partnered with local groups in the Gulf region to monitor this ongoing leak, and kept the story in the news with repeated media interviews. This past fall, our interview with the Washington Post revealed that based on the latest scientific estimates of the leak rate the Taylor spill was about to surpass BPs disastrous 2010 blowout in the Gulf, becoming the worlds worst oil spill. News outlets around the world pounced on this headline, shining a global spotlight on this chronic leak and prompting the Coast Guard to take action. We continue to work closely with Global Fishing Watch staff after launching this program as an independent nonprofit organization in mid-2017. Together, we are providing vessel-monitoring training to authorities in Peru, and continue to work with staff and officials in the fisheries ministry and government of Indonesia. In February, our co-authored paper, Tracking the Global Footprint of Fisheries, was published in the prestigious journal Science. Our finding that the area in the ocean affected by fishing is four times greater than the area of land used for agriculture generated major international media coverage. We have made significant progress monitoring transshipments, in which fishing vessels deposit their catch on refrigerated cargo ships at sea to avoid detection in port. Our data scientist has been working to develop and validate an algorithm that identifies vessel encounters and loitering behaviors that indicate transshipment activity. We published a transshipment data layer powered by this work in the Global Fishing Watch map and data portal. Additionally, the journal Frontiers in Marine Science published the paper, Identifying Global Patterns of Transshipment Behavior, authored by researchers at SkyTruth and GFW. It is the first-ever global assessment of transshipment in a scientific journal, and it describes our work automating the detection of vessel behaviors that enable overfishing, IUU (Illegal, Unregulated and Unreported) fishing, and human rights violations at sea.Climate and EnergyWorking with Duke University, Appalachian Voices, and Google, we built algorithms to improve our historical mountaintop removal mining analysis, creating and validating an annual mining footprint dataset beginning in the 1980s with updates for every year after. We built an interactive map to allow users to explore the data, including giving them the ability to generate simple reports on mining activity by county and their own areas of interest. We continue to make this data available to research partners who now have several new projects underway, promising to add to the body of research that has already influenced public mining policy and practices. And we are currently processing the data to publish it, aggregated by state, county, watershed, and other administrative units to make it user-friendly for a broader range of stakeholders. In July, our paper, Mapping the yearly extent of surface coal mining in Central Appalachia using Landsat and Google Earth Engine, was published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The paper provides the first comprehensive map of annual surface coal mining extent in Central Appalachia and the analysis relies on an algorithm our geospatial analysts developed to run on the Google Earth Engine cloud-computing platform. A key revelation from our work is that the amount of land destroyed to mine a ton of coal has tripled in just the past ten years, a stark indicator of the financial instability of coal mining in Appalachia. We held a webinar to discuss our work with members of the media and other environmental organizations, generating more media exposure for this issue (including Inside Climate News, Yale e360, ThinkProgress, Smithsonian and others). And in December our work illustrated a major report from Human Rights Watch, Deregulating Mountaintop Removal Threatens Drinking Water and Public Health. We are continuing to publish and maintain an interactive map and companion dataset of natural gas flaring events we detect worldwide using nightly satellite imagery that measures light and temperature. We routinely get requests from users for explanation and support, including scientific researchers and private-sector commercial users involved in commodities consulting and forecasting, and alternative power generation projects.WatchdogIn 2018 we rebuilt our SkyTruth Alerts system that notifies subscribers to pollution events in their areas of concern. By March we built a working prototype of Alerts 2.0 that included two major upgrades over the original system: land-cover change alerts automatically detected from satellite imagery; and a monthly time-series of high-resolution satellite images that allow users to zoom in and closely inspect places where change has been detected. We also increased the type of information users can access through Alerts or the Alerts maps. These include not only the oil and hazardous materials spill reports from the National Response Center (available since 2012), but also oil and gas reports from selected states, tree cover loss from Global Forest Watch, and pollution violation data from the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2018 we internalized the expertise to scrape that is systematically search agency and other databases and simplified the process, successfully restoring several broken data streams to the Alerts system, and making it easier for us to add new data sources. We also ensured that Alerts users can download data into formats that allow them to conduct their own analyses and take action. In 2018 we began our work on Conservation Vision, that is, using Artificial Intelligence to detect changes on land and water that could indicate harmful environmental activities. This platform offers the potential for ubiquitous monitoring and detection of changes in the environment in a timely way to enable effective action. The rapidly increasing availability of daily high quality satellite imagery and geospatial data from an ever growing array of public and private sources, combined with sophisticated tools for handling and analyzing data, makes it possible to automatically monitor, analyze and alert people to activities and incidents of concern. Weve started our Conservation Vision journey with oil and gas activities in Pennsylvania. In a poster session in December 2018 at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting, SkyTruth staff presented our initial results. We demonstrated that our algorithm could detect the presence of oil and gas infrastructure in Pennsylvania with 84% accuracy, a strong first step.
Interesting data from their 2020 990 filing
The purpose of the non-profit is listed in the filing as “Skytruth's mission is to motivate and empower new constituencies for environmental protection. we use scientifically credible satellite images and other visual technologies to create compelling pictures that vividly illustrate environmental impacts and provide these images and supporting data to environmental advocates, the media, decisionmakers and the public.”.
When discussing its operations, they were characterized as: “Skytruth's mission is to motivate and empower new constituencies for environmental protection. we use scientifically credible satellite images and other visual technologies to create compelling pictures that vividly illustrate environmental impacts and provide these images and supporting data to environmental advocates, the media, decisionmakers and the public.”.
- The non-profit's legally reported state of operation is WV.
- The filing states that the non-profit's address in the year 2020 is PO Box 3283, Shepherdstown, WV, 254433283.
- The form submitted by the non-profit for 2020 shows a total of 15 employees.
- Does not operate a hospital.
- Does not operate a school.
- Does not collect art.
- Does not provide credit counseling.
- Has foreign activities.
- Is not a donor-advised fund.
- Is not a private foundation.
- Expenses are greater than $1,000,000.
- Revenue is between $500,000 and $1,000,000+.
- Revenue less expenses is -$479,133.
- The remuneration plan for the CEO of the organization is based on a review and approval process by a neutral entity.
- The organization has 11 independent voting members.
- The organization was formed in 2001.
- The organization is required to file Schedule B.
- The organization is required to file Schedule O.
- The organization pays $638,975 in salary, compensation, and benefits to its employees.
- The organization pays $54,314 in fundraising expenses.
- The organization provides Form 990 to its governing body.
- The organization has minutes of its meetings.
- The organization has a written whistleblower policy.
- The organization's financial statements were reviewed by an accountant.