COVSCAN

The Coastal Blind Spot

Picture a marine protected area manager trying to answer a simple question: how many boats anchor over the seagrass bed each summer? There’s no clean way to find out.

Most coastal traffic leaves no trace. Recreational boats, small-scale fisheries, and local tourism operators aren’t required to carry AIS transponders, so the vessels that actually define coastal pressure, such as anchoring near reefs, crowding popular coves, working inshore grounds, go unrecorded. And conventional satellite surveillance, built for open-ocean tracking of large ships, struggles near shore: low image resolution, wave clutter, shallow water, and land interference get in the way, at a steep cost.

As a result, Marine Protected Areas struggle to quantify anchoring damage, tourism destinations can’t measure seasonal congestion, fisheries go unmonitored, and development projects lack any historical baseline. Decisions that should be evidence-based end up being guesswork.

COVSCAN: Precision Monitoring for Complex Coasts

Funded by the ESA Business Incubation Centre (Portugal), the Coastal Vessel Scan (COVSCAN) service was built specifically to close that gap.

It combines high-resolution optical satellite imagery, AI trained specifically to recognize vessels, and advanced geospatial processing to map coastal vessel activity. Where generic ocean-surveillance algorithms falter near the coast, COVSCAN’s detection logic is purpose-built for the land-sea boundary: it filters out land noise, harbour structures, and shallow-water artifacts that would otherwise produce false readings.

Years of history, not years of waiting. Because COVSCAN works from existing satellite archives, it can reconstruct vessel activity patterns going back years, giving clients an instant baseline instead of waiting on a long-term field study to accumulate one.

Built around three simple parameters. Every COVSCAN service is defined by the client:

• Region of Interest: where to look
• Time Window: when to look
• Frequency: how often to look

Only the specific area and time period requested gets processed, so clients pay for exactly the monitoring their project requires, whether that’s a single seasonal snapshot or an ongoing multi-year watch.

What clients receive. Our service delivers a tailored analytical report on spatial and temporal (if requested) trends, plus the underlying vessel detections as raw, georeferenced, dated point data ready to drop straight into existing GIS workflows.

From Data to Decisions

COVSCAN turns satellite imagery into the kind of evidence coastal managers actually need to act on.

Spatial planning and zoning. Real traffic distribution data lets authorities draw boundaries and define anchoring restrictions around vulnerable ecosystems with confidence.

Enforcement. Patrol resources are limited. COVSCAN shows exactly where and when vessel density peaks, so monitoring efforts can focus on the highest-risk zones at the highest-risk times.

Tourism management. Destinations get objective indicators for setting nautical carrying capacitie, and a way to measure whether restrictions are actually working once they’re in place.

Habitat restoration. Around sensitive sites like seagrass nurseries, COVSCAN tracks vessel compliance over time, giving restoration teams a way to verify that protective measures are holding.

Already in the water. COVSCAN is currently deployed under contract in the Ria Formosa coastal lagoon, mapping vessel density, yearly trends and seasonal patterns from 2020 to 2030 as part of an ongoing seagrass conservation project.

See what COVSCAN can reveal about your coastline. Get in touch to discuss a pilot region, or request a sample report to see the data in action.