Time is running out to save the world's coral reefs, so conservationists are turning to every tool possible to protect disappearing reefs, including ai.
In Florida, the race is on restore reefs “planting” human-raised corals. It's an uphill battle as rising ocean temperatures stress already struggling reefs. Tracking progress is essential but tedious work.
In the past, coral conservationists would have had to physically swim to the reefs to take notes on the individual corals they had planted using a pencil and waterproof waxed paper. “It can't scale with the scale of their restoration effort. And eventually, you'll spend more time supervision coral restoration than it really is doing coral restoration,” says Alexander Neufeld, scientific program director at the Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF).
In the past, coral conservationists would have had to physically swim to the reefs to take notes on the individual corals they had planted using a pencil and waterproof waxed paper.
Not only is this a time-consuming strategy, but simply taking manual notes on each individual coral risks missing the bigger picture: the health of the reef as a whole. “We don't necessarily focus on individuals. “We focus on populations, we focus on communities – these broader ecological groups of organisms that we are trying to restore,” Neufeld says.
That's where ai can give conservationists an advantage, giving them more valuable time to rescue corals while also giving them new insights into how they can make the biggest impact. This is the goal of a new tool called CeruleanAI developed by the Coral Restoration Foundation, a Florida-based nonprofit organization. The tool uses ai to analyze 3D maps of reefs, giving researchers a new vantage point to monitor restoration efforts in a warming world.
In Florida, pollution, overfishing, boat damage and disease have already decimated reefs. There has been a 90 percent drop in the region's healthy coral cover since the 1970s. To make matters worse, climate change is also killing corals. When the water gets too hot, corals expel the algae that give them their color, a phenomenon called bleaching. If the problem persists, the corals, which are animals, die. That's what happened in the summer of 2023, when water temperatures hot enough to be in a hot tub caused a without precedents Coral bleaching event. CRF lost virtually all of the young corals it had planted at some reef sites.
Neufeld and the CRF team are striving to make up for lost ground. To replenish reefs, conservationists can raise new individual corals on land. They can do this by artificially setting the environment for them to reproduce sexually or by getting them to clone by separating coral colonies so that each fragment grows into a new colony. Either way, the baby corals will eventually have to be “planted” in the sea, where the reefs they create support the lives of thousands of other species.
After planting the young corals, CRF periodically revisits them to see how they are doing. In recent years, CRF has transitioned from taking notes by hand to taking images with GoPros. Back on shore, they use software to stitch those images together into 3D photomosaics (which you can see at The edgerecent video on coral restoration). Neufeld got the idea from his experiences in a university program that used 3D modeling to document shipwrecks and underwater archaeological artifacts.
Applied to coral restoration, photomosaics help CRF see how well the reef is recovering with the help of the corals they have planted. Elkhorn, for example, is considered a “branching” coral that forms dense thickets that become important habitats for other creatures. Success is not just about the survival of individually planted corals; It is also watching them grow and merge to cover the seabed.
To achieve the greatest impact, CRF has taken its ground techniques one step further. They have created a tool that leverages artificial intelligence to collect data from the images they have collected. “Wouldn't it be cool if instead of sitting in front of a computer for hours and manually outlining all these corals, you just had ai scan an image and say, 'Oh yeah, that's an elkhorn (coral) right there '?' Neufeld says.
Now, with the click of a button, they can discover what types of coral species, such as elkhorn, are found on the reef, where they are located, and how much they have grown since the CRF's last visit. It also helps them figure out how to give corals the best chance of survival and frees up conservationists to spend more time in the water. “We can more quickly implement necessary changes based on what we see in the data,” Neufeld says.
Soon, conservationists around the world will be able to use the same tools that CRF has developed. The United States has pumped millions of dollars of federal funds to restore Florida's reefs, working with academic and nonprofit groups, including CRF. Many restoration efforts around the world do not have access to the same resources. CRF plans to launch CeruleanAI early next year, which it says it will offer on a sliding scale or for free to other conservation groups depending on how much need they have.
One thing to keep in mind is that, as useful as this tool may be, the explosion of ai has its own environmental footprint. It takes a lot of energy to train ai models, worrying some advocates about whether the greenhouse gas emissions from all that computing could make it harder to fight climate change. It's still too early to say exactly what the overall environmental cost is, so researchers say it's important at this point to be aware of how ai is used, that is, whether it justifies the potential environmental risks.
In this case, at least, ai is helping to mitigate the effects of climate change on the world's oceans, although much work remains to be done to prevent ocean heat waves from getting worse thanks to uncontrolled greenhouse gas pollution. greenhouse.
After historic heat hit the Florida Keys this year, CRF monitoring efforts revealed huge losses on some reefs. “We saw that everything had bleached, everything had died, and unfortunately that means this year was kind of a washout for that part (of the reef),” Neufeld says. “But again, that doesn't mean we've lost everything everywhere. That doesn't mean what we did was wrong in any way. It just means we have a lot of work ahead of us in the future.”
