Monitoring you can count on
Clarity above and below the water
As with most innovations at Cascadia Seaweed, OceanNexus™ evolved from one of our own needs. We've always seen ourselves as collaborative sector builders as well as entrepreneurs, and that mindset turned an internal research challenge into an opportunity.
It started with a question: Do seaweed farms function as habitat for salmon and their prey?
To investigate, our team adapted an open-source underwater camera design and developed what would become the LookSea™ camera. Programmed to record five minutes every hour, the cameras produced a lot of footage, and someone — or something — needed to review it.
With support from Mitacs, University of Victoria researchers worked with Cascadia to develop computer-vision methods capable of identifying and counting important fish in the footage. This required significant human involvement, repeated model training, testing, and quality control. Ocean Networks Canada supported a parallel part of the research, helping with oceanographic-monitoring design, instrument evaluation, data stewardship, and quality assurance.
Those research tools created the foundation for something larger. Continued development —including the LookSeaTM camera system, AI-assisted species detection, human review, ecological interpretation, software infrastructure, and client-facing reporting — has since evolved into OceanNexus™, Cascadia Nature-based Solutions’ biodiversity intelligence platform.
Around the same time, our Cascadia Nature-based Solutions (CNbS) team was seeing the same underlying need from a different direction. As development accelerates and expectations for environmental accountability rise, decision-makers need clearer evidence of what's happening underwater and how it's changing over time.
"OceanNexus™ began on Cascadia's kelp farms, where we needed credible, repeatable monitoring to understand how farms function as habitat for salmon and their prey, ensuring ecosystem service claims are backed by auditable MRV, not assumptions," says Dr. Colin Bates, lead researcher on the BCSRIF project.
The opportunity extends well beyond kelp farming.
Marine operators increasingly need more than occasional snapshots; they need consistent, comparable, and auditable evidence of ecological change over time.
Over the past two years, OceanNexus™ has grown from an internal tool into an emerging commercial product.
Its foundations have been tested through research and First Nations stewardship projects, and the platform is now being developed for broader use by marine operators, coastal and Indigenous stewards, monitoring organizations and public-sector decision-makers.
This spring, it launched globally at Oceanology International in London, one of the world’s leading ocean technology conferences.
Conversations with prospective customers, technology partners, journalists, investors, and monitoring organizations made one thing clear: there is strong demand for more credible, scalable aquatic biodiversity monitoring.
“As the combined pressures of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution intensifies, biodiversity is becoming increasingly important to how marine activity is measured, managed, and reported," says Jennifer O'Neill, Director of Cascadia Nature-based Solutions. "It's been encouraging to see strong interest from Europe, where biodiversity disclosure is already entering business and investment decisions. What began as a forward-thinking monitoring tool for our seaweed farms now has the potential to help organizations respond with credible evidence—and to help marine sectors in Canada and elsewhere prepare for growing expectations from regulators, investors, clients and communities.”
For shareholders, OceanNexus™ also provides a window into how Cascadia develops new opportunities from its existing capabilities.
"CNbS complements the agricultural product side of our business and completes who we are as a company," says Erin Bremner-Mitchell, Manager of Communications and Engagement. "OceanNexus™ gives our customers clarity under the water, but building it has also given us clarity in our own business. Because we're vertically integrated, we have insight across our entire value chain, and what we learn in one part of the business strengthens the others. The services provided by CNbS, and associated products such as OceanNexus™, give us a way to turn that knowledge into revenue, building a profitable business while supporting others and proving that industry can work in harmony with people and the planet."
Know someone working in marine stewardship, ocean industry, regulation, or coastal development?
Share this page with them to help introduce OceanNexus™ and Cascadia Nature-based Solutions. https://oceannexus.ai/splash
