Nature and technology often intersect in ways that you’d never expect, like when it comes to coral reefs and the cloud.
In addition to being some of the most beautiful constructions on the planet, coral reefs are at the heart of a growing technological movement to preserve the ocean’s most biodiverse ecosystem and ensure a sustainable planet.
To shine light on this initiative, EDB’s CMO Michael Gale interviewed leading coral reef scientist and Director of Coral Reef Conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Dr. Emily Darling on Forbes Futures in Focus podcast. Dr. Darling co-founded MERMAID (Marine Ecological Research Management AID) to help scientists identify, monitor, and share information on climate-resistant coral reefs to enable rapid action for reef protection.
In the podcast, Dr. Darling shared that our oceans absorb 90% of excess heat from greenhouse gas emissions and rising ocean temperatures are causing corals to bleach and die. Climate change and other human pressures have caused the loss of 14% of the world’s coral reefs since 2010.
In an effort to save coral from record-high ocean temperatures in Florida, divers pulled coral fragments out of the ocean and relocated them into aquariums of cooler water, as reported in the New York Times. But as Dr. Darling pointed out, these practices aren’t yet sustainable or scalable over the long term.
“What we're seeing now is that even the best technologies around coral restoration and replanting corals aren't safe from climate change,” says Dr. Darling. “Our strategy at the Wildlife Conservation Society and with MERMAID is to look for natural coral reef resilience. What can we learn about ecological integrity or intact natural ecosystems? What does that tell us about the location of climate-resilient coral reefs? And then how do we scale the necessary data, technology, and science into global policy action?”
Many governments see the importance of taking steps to protect our planet. In December 2022, 190 countries adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which aims to protect at least 30% of the world’s land and sea areas by 2030. But currently, only 8% of our ocean’s waters have legal protection, and a very small fraction of these waters are fully protected for the strongest biodiversity benefits.
Dr. Darling believes part of the answer is in identifying and sharing where and how certain coral reefs can survive climate change.
Dr. Darling points out that some coral reefs in the Red Sea can survive superheated temperatures because they’ve adapted to it over a long geological history. She says she’s also seen some coral reefs in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania escape bleaching because of environmental features like deeper canyons and cooler waters.
“We need to use coral reef monitoring data to identify and connect climate-resilient reefs, creating a global network that can serve as a blueprint for biodiversity recovery as we address the climate crisis,” Dr. Darling says. “We can use technology and AI to rapidly scale up efforts to identify these reefs with underwater monitoring data.”
Dr. Darling’s team at MERMAID is heading up this climate-resistant research by using MERMAID, an open source web application built on Postgres that is currently used by over 2,000 scientists in 44 countries around the world.
“This is one of the first times that scientists all over the world are able to contribute their data to a common platform that can help identify this critical network of coral reefs,” says Dr. Darling.
This is where AI is essential as well. As cameras or GoPros become more accessible and affordable to people from lower and higher-income countries alike, coral reef scientists and citizen scientists can take pictures underwater that can be used to provide clues about coral resilience, especially when the images are processed quickly.
Currently, MERMAID is developing AI and deep learning algorithms that automatically drop points on these images and classify the points as living coral or algae, or what type of coral it is. This process, which previously required scientists to individually classify each point and took weeks or months of manual evaluation can now be completed within hours.
“We'll always rely on human expertise in building these models,” says Dr. Darling, “but the future is limitless for processing and sharing images globally, enabling scientists to scale up and accelerate using the same platform.”
Dr. Darling notes that we must be practical and meaningful in our approach to how we blend technologies with traditional knowledge that can help communities monitor and manage the reefs and connect to national and global policy action.
Communities and governments need data and evidence to act quickly though. After the largest cyclone to ever make landfall on the southern hemisphere devastated Fiji’s Ovalau islands, Fiji’s Nauouo village survived by opening their tabu (a locally managed marine area) to fishing by the community. After the cyclone, WCS teams worked with the Nauouo community to assess the status of the tabu. With MERMAID, the scientists were able to conduct underwater survey dives enter survey data, and present key findings to the community in one day. Based on the findings that fish abundance had been overfished to unsustainable levels, the village closed their tabu the next morning to replenish fish populations and ensure they’d have food to help the community through future cyclones or other climate disasters.
This type of data on coral reef health and fisheries helps communities prepare for natural disasters, and it also helps governments meet ambitious goals for biodiversity like Fiji's national ocean policy to conserve 30% of its waters and sustainably manage 100% of the country.
“Currently, data in MERMAID is helping Fijian scientists find new climate-resilient coral reefs that can guide ongoing national policy processes like 30 by 30. Connecting data to the people making decisions can accelerate and scale up into evidence-based national and even international policy change,” says Dr. Darling.
She mentions three things that are critical to finding and implementing solutions to successfully protect ecosystems:
- Prioritize near real time monitoring of climate impacted ecosystems: Whether it's coral reefs, tropical forests, or peatlands, we need to understand the ecological integrity, function and resilience of key ecosystems on our planet. Sometimes satellites can help us do that, and other times, like for coral reefs, we also need monitoring information and can engage global networks of scientists and citizen scientists to compile this information to determine what is happening on our planet.
- Connect and use existing technologies: People need to be using the same technologies to accelerate this type of monitoring. As we quickly drive toward reducing biodiversity loss by 2030, we have to look at what’s already working and build integration between existing platforms, instead of just spinning off new efforts.
- Build for cloud-native architecture: By designing and building applications that fully take advantage of cloud computing, we are creating software that runs efficiently, automatically scales to handle more users, and can be used in the most remote and physically challenging environments through offline capabilities. While Dr. Darling’s team rely on low-tech monitoring equipment like rubber bands, clipboards and pencils to monitor coral reefs underwater, , processing and analyzing the data on computers is more powerful using cloud-native technologies that can be used by any coral reef scientist worldwide.
“Part of MERMAID’s success is that we’re a modern web app – online, offline, connected by APIs, leveraging different data sets, and building into online cloud native notebooks and analysis scripts. This can help democratize data and data science so that scientists all over the world can use the same tools,” says Dr. Darling.
“There's such an opportunity to ensure that coral reef scientists from coral reef countries are going to be the leading data scientists in the next 10 years,” she says. “MERMAID helps coral reef data be collected, analyzed, and shared immediately back to communities and back to decision makers."
The goal of MERMAID is to unite coral reef monitoring and conservation efforts in a global data platform that can take the pulse of coral reef health in world time, and transform underwater observations into policy change to ensure the coral reefs on our planet will be here in 2030 and well beyond.
Learn more about coral reefs and MERMAID at https://datamermaid.org
Learn more about Postgres and AI at https://www.enterprisedb.com
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