Back in May, we wrote about Global Plastic Watch, an application that is able to detect plastic waste and create an interactive map of plastic pollutants that gets updated in real-time.

Another AI project aimed to do the same thing uses satellite imagery from the European Space Agency to find big chunks of plastic waste, according to The Conversation.

Researchers can then determine, over time, if these sites grow bigger and if they are close to lakes and rivers, so they can be urgently dealt with before they get in water ecosystems.

The AI system was able to find some 4.000 waste sites, out of which, one in five is within 200 meters of a water point.

While AI is definitely great for detecting these sites and patterns in general, it should not be trusted entirely on its own, so it is important the at least one person tracks the progress of computers and analyses the data to make sure everything is correct.

This means that the AI helps us find the problems, but it is up to us to determine which needs urgent action and to prioritize in general.

To yield even more accurate results, researchers and organization could, in the future, deploy special drones and sample pick-up points that can collect and analyze tracks of marine life.

This way, we would know is a particular zone is more affected by pollution than others and what type of waste might have invaded an ecosystem.

Using AI to make our work easier is essential if we want to protect our planet in the future, no matter if it's the land, the air or our waters.