How Skytec used satellite analysis to help Caddis Tech prove its chemical-free algae treatment worked — and decide which ponds needed treatment most
In 2026, Cleveland Metroparks deployed a new technology at Garfield Pond, the park system’s “crown jewel.” By substantially reducing the need for chemical treatments and eliminating the labor-intensive task of raking algae, it freed park staff to focus on other important park maintenance tasks.
What was this new technology?
The park system hired Caddis Tech to deploy its MANTA aquadrone system (two patents pending) to clean the pond. They began treating the pond’s algae problem beginning in May 2026. As a result, the park has had minimal chemical use since then. In years past, Garfield Pond—just like millions of ponds around the U.S.—required regular biweekly additions of chemicals for algae control.
Jennifer Grieser, Director of Natural Resources at Cleveland Metroparks, described the MANTA in a recent appearance on Ideastream’s Sound of Ideas. “A current test we also have going on at Garfield Park is with Caddis Technology—which is an aquatic drone that uses UV to treat harmful bacteria, and it’s been providing excellent results and has reduced staff time to clean the pond. Last year, we were spending about 20 hours a week to do that work, and now the drone just comes and zips around, kind of like a Roomba but for water, and it’s done in about an hour and a half.”
The MANTA has been successful in controlling Garfield Pond’s algae, despite being designed to begin work before the algal bloom season (late winter), as a preventive rather than a cleanup measure.
Dr. Kendall Byrd, MANTA’s co-inventor along with Dr. Jiyoung Lee, Ohio State University’s chair of the Environmental Sciences Department, spent two years earning his Master’s degree (and will have completed his PhD mid-July 2026) while working and applying aerial drones to the task of monitoring water quality in small, manmade freshwater ponds.
Such ponds of five acres or less constitute approximately 95% of freshwater bodies in the world by count. They are also susceptible to algal overgrowth (think of the Reflecting Pool), including toxic algae, known in the business as Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs), which can release both hepatotoxins and neurotoxins into the environment.
By 2023 Byrd had grown tired of focusing strictly on monitoring. He wanted action. He saw people doing good work in the monitoring space, but when it came to algae treatment, he thought, “This area is lacking; if I’m going to do something impactful, that’s where I should go.” He started thinking about how his experience with autonomous aerial drones could translate into water.
In the best tradition of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos, he built a prototype unmanned aquatic surface vehicle in his basement. Its design inspired by the filter-feeding behavior of manta rays, he dubbed the aquadrone MANTA, short for Mobile Algae Neutralizing Treatment Agent.
“The boat wakes up, drives itself, cleans, and turns off automatically,” explains Byrd. Water is sucked through narrow tubes that prevent larger organisms from ever entering the system but allow algae to pass through the UV-C beam, killing the organisms in fractions of a second. Water treatment facilities commonly use UV-C (one of three types of UV light) in the final stage of disinfection.
Partnership with Skytec
Prior to earning his Master’s, Byrd also worked for Skytec LLC, a company that specializes in translating satellite imagery combined with specific, sometimes proprietary, datasets to create environmental intelligence in near real time. His thinking and his ambitions for the MANTA have been informed by his experience there.
Bill Rogers, Skytec’s CEO, explains the concept of environmental intelligence: “The data that machines and humans generate today is massive and growing. This has never been truer for geospatial data. However, the ultimate value of the data lies in the ability to make sense of it, derive impactful insights, and turn them into action. This is where Skytec excels.” Skytec has partnered with Byrd to begin developing a powerful means of assessing needs, results, and priorities for pond cleanup by analyzing images taken from space!
In 2025, Heritage Golf Club in Hilliard, Ohio, became the first location to deploy and evaluate Caddis Technologies’ autonomous MANTA algae management system.
In addition, Skytec provided satellite-based monitoring to independently quantify changes in algal abundance. Skytec assessed nearly 20 indices of pond algal growth and proposed a multi-index approach for assessing algal conditions in small ponds. Using ground-truthing data from the MANTA, the team found that water quality parameters can be linked to Skytec’s imagery.
Moreover, unlike traditional methods that rely on intermittent sampling and delayed laboratory results, MANTA continuously collects water-quality data every 5 seconds while operating. During a typical survey of a one-acre pond, this results in approximately 1200 spatially referenced measurements, providing managers with near real-time, whole-pond insights rather than information from just a handful of sampling locations.
Data collected include:
- pH
- conductivity
- Temperature
Caddis Tech is also adding:
- Turbidity
- Color sensing
These can all serve as proxy measures for algae (sensors to measure presence or absence of algae itself are orders of magnitude more expensive). Users of the MANTA system can remotely access a dashboard to view charts, interactive maps, and suggestions for future treatment needs.
But that is just the beginning.
A marriage made in the heavens
“The dream is for this service to operate worldwide,” Byrd says.
Skytec’s visual data and images can be used to remotely measure all kinds of chemical and biological properties. Algae photosynthesize, and there are at least 100 ways to measure photosynthesis remotely.
Byrd would like to build on Skytec’s proposed multi-index approach for assessing algal conditions. “You need training data for converting visual images to a measure of, for example, pH,” explains Byrd. “Once you have enough data, the analysis becomes reliable (90% confidence), and you can use interpolation to map much larger areas.”
“Imagine marrying the datasets,” Byrd continues. “Today’s satellites can image the US in 24 hours—even the entire world! Skytec also has the unique ability to interpret environmental data and create user-friendly dashboards.”
Caddis Tech and Skytec do not yet have the data to do this, but Caddis Tech’s goal is to combine MANTA spatial data over ~100 water bodies with imagery analyzed by Skytec from those same locations, making it possible to create an interpolated map of water quality for the entire US (or, say, the country’s PGA golf courses), which could be updated on a weekly or even daily basis.
“In the future,” promises Byrd, “every time we submit a grant proposal, there will be a budget line item for Skytec to do remote monitoring and some type of validation of the product.”
Bill Rogers, Skytec’s CEO, says “Kendall has a strong work ethic. I have a lot of admiration for him and what he’s done in his academic career and now in this business.”
Birth of a Business
Running a company is what’s needed to implement a new technology at scale. Thus, MANTA gave rise to the company Caddis Tech, named for the aquatic caddisfly, a species widely regarded as an indicator of good water quality. “Caddis Tech only makes money because it has to,” says Byrd. “We all love what we do. We are an environmental company first.”
The MANTA is currently in its first round of private equity funding and has received grants for the development, testing, and refinement of its design from the following start-up funds:
- OSU Accelerator Award
- Ohio Third Frontier Technology Validation and Start-up Fund
- USEC Entrepreneurship Competition
- Rev1 Concept to Contract
- Spark Clean Tech Accelerator
Interrupting the boom-and-bust cycles of toxic algae growth and control
Some forms of true algae and blue-green algae (actually cyanobacteria) can produce toxins as potent as cobra venom or curare (the active ingredient in the poisoned arrows of Central and South American indigenous peoples). HABs make the news routinely during the summer in the Everglades ecosystem and the Great Lakes, where they can impact beaches and people, wildlife and pets, and drinking water supplies. For example, a massive, toxic blue-green algal bloom in Lake Erie caused the 2014 Toledo water crisis, in which the city’s water supply was contaminated, forcing nearly 400,000 residents in Ohio and Michigan under a three-day “do not drink or boil” advisory.
Yet, the most widely used method for controlling nuisance algae still relies on a technology introduced more than a century ago: copper sulfate (CuSO₄), an algaecide first adopted in the early 1900s. Golf courses, neighborhood overflow ponds, and municipal park pond algae treatments must be conducted biweekly or so throughout the growing season. The chemical is also toxic to fish, amphibians, and other aquatic organisms.
Many freshwater systems therefore experience cycles of suppression followed by rapid regrowth. This results in inconsistent water quality, the need for recurring treatment, fluctuating aesthetics, and ecological impacts such as low-oxygen conditions associated with biomass die-offs.
Even more problematic is additional data collected at Heritage Golf Club in 2025. Throughout the season, water samples were collected every two weeks for microbial DNA analysis. The microbial analyses revealed that copper-resistance genes were among the most abundant resistance genes detected. Long-term reliance on copper sulfate is well known to select for copper-resistant microbial communities, reducing the effectiveness of copper-based algae control over time—much as the overuse of antibiotics has led to antibiotic-resistant bacteria and repeated herbicide applications have driven the evolution of glyphosate-resistant weeds.
The beauty of the MANTA system is not only that it eliminates the use of toxic chemicals, but its autonomous and unmatched frequency in cleaning cycles stops the boom-and-bust cycle of algal blooms followed by rounds of copper sulfate treatment.
First commercial applications of MANTA in Ohio
Algae already costs Ohio millions of dollars every year. Harmful algal blooms regularly force beach closures along Lake Erie, reducing tourism and recreation, while taxpayers continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars through programs such as H2Ohio to improve water quality. Local governments, park systems, golf courses, utilities, and lake managers also spend millions more each year on repeated chemical treatments, monitoring, and cleanup to keep ponds and lakes usable. Yet despite these ongoing investments, nuisance algae often return season after season.
“MANTA treatment is comparable in cost to copper sulfate treatment,” notes Byrd. “It also frees up staff time that would otherwise be used to apply copper, and it improves revenue when beaches and lakes no longer have to be closed.”
To prioritize ponds for treatment, call Skytec
“When asked which ponds in an area to treat, that’s easy. We call Skytec. Using historical satellite imagery, we could designate a top tier of ponds for treatment, another tier that will need treatment soon, and a bottom tier that does not require treatment at all.” Remote assessment becomes an optimization tool and another way to save money.
“Caddis Tech will take off because park superintendents and golf course managers will see it’s working,” observes Rogers. “The Park’s Superintendent will get one unified flow of data from the MANTA dashboard to make water management decisions. She or he won’t have to go out to all the ponds. Even taking photos and flying drones is still more time and resource-intensive than satellite imagery combined with MANTA.
Caddis Tech’s use of remote monitoring for freshwater pond maintenance is another example of Skytec’s application of ever-evolving geospatial techniques and technologies to develop tools for a specific purpose. “The scale of customer projects, Esri integration, our network of data partners, and GIS expertise separate Skytec from our competitors,” affirms Rogers. By being flexible and responsive to their clients’ changing needs, Skytec is completing ever-larger projects for clients at the cutting edge of evolving environmental intelligence.
Byrd notes, “There is no other commercially available freshwater cleaning system that integrates monitoring, treatment, remote oversight, and scalable deployment. It’s a worthwhile endeavor for sure. When I get stressed, I remind myself to just worry about the water. That’s what’s most important.”