New mapping of world’s coral reefs from space [1]
Wednesday, June 9, 2021 - 19:25. Updated on Friday, June 25, 2021 - 22:44.
The problem for coral reef science is that the vast majority of the world’s reefs are so remote that scientists can’t get there, or can’t get there often.
Maps of all the coral reefs in the world will be created quickly with new technology by NASA through a partnership with the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation (KSLOF), announced on World Ocean’s Day, 8 June.
The partnership means NASA can use KSLOF coral reef data that was collected during the Foundation’s Global Reef Expedition, one of the largest surveys of corals ever done.
The expedition took over ten years mapping and surveying coral reefs in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans as well as the Red Sea, creating 65,000 square kilometers of coral reef habitat maps, or about one-fifth of the world’s coral reefs.
The world has lost more than half of its reefs over the past 40 years and the remainder could be lost by the end of the century if reef conservation efforts don’t quickly address it.
Through neural networks and machine learning, NASA is automating the process, using KSLOF data, to power NeMO-Net, a project that aims to map and track the health of the world’s coral reefs to give us the best look beneath the waves we’ve ever had.
KSLOF’s Chief Scientist and professor at the University of Miami, Sam Purkis said the problem for coral reef science is that the vast majority of the world’s reefs are so remote that scientists can’t get there, or can’t get there often.
“With this data in NASA’s hands, now suddenly you don’t have to go into the field, you can map coral reefs from space. What an uplift to conservation that becomes.”
By using old satellite imagery, NASA will not only be able to record what reefs are like today, but they can also track how they change through time.
More accurate maps
NASA’s maps are likely to become even more accurate in the future, as satellites are launched into orbit with new technology the NeMO-Net program is developing to see beneath the waves. This includes a revolutionary new remote sensing instrument, NASA’s FluidCam [2], capable of seeing beneath ocean waves without distortion. Coral reefs can be surveyed at the centimetre scale in 3D from drones and aircraft.
NeMO-Net uses this data to classify corals around the world. NASA has also acquired some of the data they needed with the help of tens of thousands of citizen scientists around the world playing the NeMO-Net game [3], an interactive citizen-science video game in which players identify and classify corals from 3D imagery of the reefs. The data KSLOF is providing will validate and ground-truth training data they need to accurately map coral reefs from satellite imagery on a global scale.
With this combination of tools and information, NeMO-Net’s maps will become more accurate, giving researchers and environmental managers better information about what’s happening to coral reefs and how to protect them at a time when they are experiencing unprecedented anthropogenic pressures.
Corals are an ancient life form and because of the reefs that they build, the survival of countless other organisms is predicated on healthy coral ecosystems.
Creating maps of the world’s coral reefs will give researchers and environmental managers better information about what is happening to coral reefs and how to protect them at a time when they're at risk due to rising sea temperatures and other hazards such as overfishing, pollution, and coastal development.