ATLAS: Expert-Guided Sustainable Satellite Backhaul for Off-Grid Wildlife Monitoring

Abstract

Remote wildlife monitoring increasingly depends on high-fidelity cameras and sensors deployed far from grid power and terrestrial networks. Low Earth orbit satellite links can provide connectivity in these settings, but their high power draw and variable bandwidth, combined with intermittent on-site solar harvesting, make continuous backhaul infeasible. Current systems therefore filter at the edge, with motion triggers that waste limited energy and bandwidth on environmental artifacts, or fixed vision models that cannot follow evolving expert objectives. We present \textsc{ATLAS}, an expert-guided edge-to-cloud system that treats satellite backhaul as a scarce resource for off-grid wildlife monitoring. \textsc{ATLAS} uses foundation models to compile natural-language expert intent into semantic scoring logic, combines semantic relevance with environmental and energy state, and uses a constrained reinforcement-learning scheduler to decide which clips to upload and when. As a representative case study, we deployed \textsc{ATLAS} for over six months across 18 off-grid salmon-monitoring river sites. \textsc{ATLAS} achieves a mean clip-selection accuracy of $87.4\%$, exceeding mean baseline accuracy by $26.4$ percentage points, while maintaining near-continuous operation through low-solar periods in which baselines incur 16.0\% downtime.