SealNet: Facial Recognition Can Help Conserve Seals
November 26th, 2022
Via AP News, a report on how facial recognition technology – which is mostly associated with uses such as surveillance and the authentication of human faces – can help save seals.
A research team at Colgate University has developed SealNet, a database of seal faces created by taking pictures of dozens of harbor seals in Maine’s Casco Bay. The team found the tool’s accuracy in identifying the marine mammals is close to 100%, which is no small accomplishment in an ecosystem home to thousands of seals.
The researchers are working on expanding their database to make it available to other scientists, said Krista Ingram, a biology professor at Colgate and a team member. Broadening the database to include rare species such as the Mediterranean monk seal and Hawaiian monk seal could help inform conservation efforts to save those species, she said.
Cataloguing seal faces and using machine learning to identify them can also help scientists get a better idea of where in the ocean seals are located, Ingram said.
“Understanding their dispersal, understanding their patterns really helps inform any conservation efforts for the coast,” she said. “For mobile marine mammals that move around a lot and are hard to photograph in the water, we need to be able to identify individuals.”
SealNet is designed to automatically detect the face in a picture, crop it and recognize it based on facial patterns such as eyes and nose shape, as it would a human. A similar tool called PrimNet that is for use on primates had been used on seals previously, but SealNet outperformed it, the Colgate researchers said.
The Colgate team published its findings in April in the scientific journal Ecology and Evolution. They processed more than 1,700 images of more than 400 individual seals, the paper said.
The paper stated that the “ease and wealth of image data that can be processed using SealNet software contributes a vital tool for ecological and behavioral studies of marine mammals in the developing field of conservation technology.”
Harbor seals are a conservation success story in the U.S. The animals were once subject to bounties in New England, where they were widely viewed by fishermen as pests in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which turned 50 in October, extended them new protections — and populations began to rebound.
Seals and other marine mammals have long been studied using satellite trackers. Using artificial intelligence to study them is a way to bring conservation into the 21st century, said Jason Holmberg, executive director of Wild Me, an Oregon-based company that works to bring machine learning to biologists. Wild Me is developing a potential partnership with SealNet.
“This is a shift and a lift of ‘big brother’ style technology to a very benevolent conservation-style goal,” Holmberg said.
Harbor seals are now fairly abundant in New England waters, where they haul out on rocks and delight seal watch cruises and beachgoers. Other seal species, however, remain in jeopardy. The Mediterranean monk seal is thought to be the world’s most endangered seal with only a few hundred animals remaining.
The use of facial recognition could provide more valuable data, said Michelle Berger, an associate scientist at the Shaw Institute in Maine, who was not involved in the SealNet research.
“Once the system is perfected I can picture lots of interesting ecological applications for it,” Berger said. “If they could recognize seals, and recognize them from year to year, that would give us lots of information about movement, how much they move from site to site.”
The Colgate researchers are also working with FruitPunch, a Dutch artificial intelligence company, to improve some aspects of SealNet to encourage wider use. FruitPunch is getting a few dozen scientists around the world to work on a challenge to streamline SealNet’s workflow, said Tjomme Dooper, FruitPunch’s head of partnerships and growth.
Improved automation of the facial recognition technology could make SealNet more useful to more scientists, Dooper said. That would open new opportunities to study the animals and help protect them, he said.
“What this does is help the biologists study the behavior of seals, and also population dynamics,” Dooper said. “Harbor seals are an important indicator species for the ecosystem around them.”
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Read More »How A.I. Helps Protect Ecosystems In The Galápagos Islands
November 26th, 2022
Via Fortune, a look at how A.I. is helping protect ecosystems in the Galápagos Islands:
Within the Galápagos Marine Reserve, one of the world’s largest and most biologically diverse marine protected areas, more than 2,900 species survive off the interconnectedness of healthy ecosystems. Globally, humans also live off the many benefits of a thriving ocean.
Technology underwater is increasing to safeguard the environments needed for the ocean to release the earth’s oxygen, sequester carbon, provide sustenance, and so much more. And data is essential to track the development of the ecosystems as threats, such as illegal fishing and climate change, fluctuate. Collecting and analyzing ocean data at a large scale—including that of rare and endangered species—gives researchers useful insight to help conserve the vital diversity that makes up such a valued part of the earth.
“Wildlife research has, until the past few years, been a world of ‘small data,’” says Jason Holmberg, executive director at Wildbook Image Analysis (WBIA), a tech company that builds open software and A.I. solutions for conservationists. “Observations of rare or endangered species, whether via collars, camera traps, DNA samples, or photos, have been expensive to obtain and often required research teams to go directly into the field for short durations to obtain even small volumes of data.”
But with the use of A.I., the data and capabilities are expanding.
Observing whale sharks through passive tracking
In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) downgraded whale sharks from vulnerable to endangered because of the many anthropogenic impacts they face, including industrial fisheries (both targeted and bycatch), vessel strikes, marine pollution, and climate change.Whale sharks, which can grow up to 60 feet long, provide significant ecological importance, according to Sofia Green, marine biologist and research scientist at the Galápagos Whale Shark Project, who studies the behavior, ecology, and migration patterns of the species. As predators on the top of the food chain, whale sharks feed off the weak and sick. By doing so, they keep the food chain in order. They also serve as carbon sequesters and nutrient-dense fertilizers by bringing nutrients (via defecation) to unhealthy ecosystems.
“If you protect sharks, you protect the ocean. And if you protect the ocean, you have a healthy planet,” she explains, while emphasizing the incredible importance of preserving the existence of all sharks. “And you cannot save a species if you don’t understand how they behave.”
In the northernmost point of the Galápagos, near the island of Darwin, Green and her team tag, video, photograph, do ultrasounds and blood draws, and take tissue samples to track the health and whereabouts of whale sharks that migrate through the Galápagos reserve. Observations like this are extremely valuable. But when made from limited studies, such as these, they may provide information at a small scale.
This is where technology like “passive tracking”—via photo identification and A.I.—broadens the data set. Whale sharks have unique spots, like human thumbprints, that can be referenced as identification. The Galápagos Whale Shark Project uses sharkbook.ai, a system run by WBIA that taps into A.I. to aggregate images of individual whale sharks uploaded by the likes of Green as well as images and videos posted on social media platforms around the world.
“Consider how whale sharks, the world’s biggest fish, were once rarely observed and even less frequently photographed,” Holmberg says. With the advent of cell phones, numerous sightings show up on YouTube and Instagram. “With this new wealth of data emerging from more cost-effective technology and public observations of wildlife, there is now an overwhelming amount of wildlife data available.”
A.I. helps sort and curate images and videos. Then sharkbook.ai classifies each whale shark based on the spot patterns and uses the photos for “capture/recapture.” For Green, this information shows where sharks appear elsewhere on the planet, when the individual returns to Galápagos, or if one has ended up on land or in an area it typically wouldn’t go (usually a result of being illegally fished).
“Modified growth algorithms like this are used by NASA to track stars,” Green explains. “It’s now being used to track the underwater constellations found on the bodies of these whale sharks.” Before this technology, researchers would obtain identification only from sharks seen on their expeditions. Through new, more expansive data collection, they now track almost 700 identified whale sharks that have migrated through the Galápagos.
When a photo is inputted for the first time, it goes into a newly created profile page. There, a summary of its sightings will build over time based on contributions. “All of this is aimed at a single goal,” Holmberg says: “Identifying the best ways to prevent extinction.”
A.I. to resolve the Galápagos “longline dilemma”
A threat to whale sharks and other species within the Galápagos Marine Reserve is the illegal longline fishing of tuna, which was banned in 2000 as a precautionary measure to prevent unintentional bycatch of endangered, threatened, and protected (ETP) species. However, it is still a common practice. Over the past two decades, people in the Galápagos have debated longline as the biggest threat to biodiversity. As a result, management authorities and environmental organizations hope to maintain the ban. On the other hand, local fishers argue that longline fishing should be authorized because it is the most cost-efficient way to catch tuna.According to a study done by marine biologist Mauricio Castrejón, Ph.D., as the local population (approximately 30,000 people spread across three habitable islands) grows, so does tuna consumption. Between 1997 and 2017, yellowfin tuna landings increased from 41.1 tons to 196.8 tons per year. Castrejón, who has led small-scale fisheries research and development projects in the Galápagos and the Eastern Tropical Pacific region (Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador) for more than 18 years, dubs this fishing debate the “longline dilemma.”
This technique of fishing trails a long line with numerous hooks behind a boat. If not properly monitored, it can result in the unintended bycatch of ETP species. Many believe the rate of bycatch isn’t as high as reported or believed. And as of now, Galápagos doesn’t have proper data collection to track and survey the true rate of bycatch. Through science, technology, and innovation, Castrejón is hoping to build better monitoring and practices, and end the debate.
One such pathway is installing video cameras created by Shellcatch onto fishing vessels, an initiative that began in 2021 after being chosen by the Charles Darwin Foundation and WildAid. The cameras capture high-resolution information of fishing activities (technique, bycatch rate, and more) to hold fishers accountable for how and what they are catching, which creates market incentives, like selling their catch at a premium.
Shellcatch uses an A.I. algorithm through its electronic monitoring sensor to quickly detect bycatch of nontarget species. “A.I. is critical in validating sustainable fishing practices and connecting supply and demand in a cost-effective way,” says Alfredo Sfeir, founder and president of Shellcatch. He also cofounded Frescapesca, a seafood marketplace that also uses A.I. With Shellcatch, fishers input data into their logbooks (per usual practice), and scientists/A.I. use the video and accumulated data to validate the information. This proves to consumers that their product is fresh, legal, sustainable, and has a low incidental catch of protected species. Hence, earning a premium market price.
Sfeir believes these technologies, including Frescapesca, will be a game changer. “With A.I., the online seafood market platform can convert a growing number of fishing events into data that optimizes logistics and creates higher margin transactions,” he says. “The end result is a growing number of fishermen and women supplying seafood and buyers ready to purchase when vessels arrive with product anywhere along the shoreline.”
Furthermore, this new data can be integrated into science-based evidence and advice to better validate the best technique, risk-averse gear, and solutions to protect other species and keep tuna fishing sustainable for the people of Galápagos and beyond.
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Read More »Geospatial Technology Helps In The Fight Against Environmental Crimes In Brazil
November 23rd, 2022
Via Planet.com, a look at how Geospatial Technology Helps In The Fight Against Environmental Crimes In Brazil at how geospatial technology is helping fight environmental crime in Brazil:
The size and complexity of the Brazilian territory, especially in the Amazon region, has historically plagued institutions, like the country’s Federal Police, with challenges around effective response to environmental crimes and illicit activities. To improve their operations, these agencies needed a remote sensing dataset that would complement their field work, allowing them to take timely action around environmental degradation in the region like illegal mining and deforestation, drug trafficking, and unauthorized fires.
Enter: The Brasil MAIS Program. This project is one of the Ministry of Justice and Public Safety’s (MJSP) strategic initiatives and is the largest remote sensing operational project in Brazil. It grants all public agencies access to RedeMAIS (Brasil MAIS Program Network), an ecosystem for sharing data, information, and unique knowledge of the entire national territory which allows for more precise and effective action. Through this project, agencies are able to gain access to Planet’s daily satellite imagery and change-detection alerts from SCCON.
With the implementation of SCCON Platform alerts powered by Planet data, the Brazilian Federal Police has made great strides in preventing illicit activities in one of the most remote regions of the world. With this data, they have been able to reduce money laundering and corruption, protect and safeguard their community, and support Federal government decision making. Today, we’re pleased to share a few highlights from the program:
With its use of Planet satellite data and SCCON’s automated change detection, the project has collected over $ 1.9 billion / R$ 9.6 billion from fines, seized goods, and the freezing of assets since 2020.
Over 3,300 public agents were mobilized in over 120 joint operations, using satellite imagery and data from the project.
To date, over 270 institutions and 26,000 users have direct access to the data in one platform, including geoservices, dashboards and reports. This cohesion promotes broad participation and support for decision-making within the Federal Government.
Accessible from anywhere in the country, the Brasil MAIS Program is fostering greater collaboration across public agencies looking to enact lasting change in the region. Planet is proud to support this work with our partner in Brazil, SCCON. To read the full report, download our comprehensive case study here.
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Read More »New Satellite Will See Water’s Big Picture
November 18th, 2022
Via Circle of Blue, a report on a new satellite that will fill global gaps in key water data:
By foot, horse, and canoe, European explorers centuries ago undertook years-long expeditions to document the length and breadth of major rivers.
Today, satellites make the first pass of discovery. Though rivers meander and melting glaciers birth new lakes annually, the world’s major drainages have largely been mapped.
Yet one fundamental dimension remains largely a mystery: the rise and fall of water bodies globally. Accurately measuring, at low-cost, the weekly changes in rivers, lakes, and wetlands would allow scientists to observe how much water moves through them. Land-based gauges do some of this work. But where gauges are scarce — Alaska, Africa, Asian headwaters — these numbers are inaccurate or unknown. The answer holds implications for flood prediction and drought response — even international diplomacy.
The vessel for this new knowledge is the Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite, a joint venture between NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatial, with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency and the UK Space Agency. Planned for nearly two decades, the mission is scheduled to launch on December 12 from Vandenberg Space Force Base, in California.
“It’s going to be completely unprecedented,” said Tamlin Pavelsky, who is in charge of the mission’s water science team.
Satellites belong to a field of observational science called remote sensing. Having eyes in the sky, either on airplanes or spacecraft, is transforming environmental monitoring and management. Reporters used satellite images from companies like Maxar and Planet Labs to pinpoint water systems in Ukraine that were damaged by Russian airstrikes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is leading a coalition to develop a satellite-based program to detect toxin-producing algae in lakes. Instruments installed on the International Space Station are refining weather forecasts by measuring water vapor in the atmosphere and water held in clouds. Scientists are exploring satellite-based measurements of plant productivity as a way to anticipate quick-forming “flash” droughts.
Satellites, like traffic cameras, can catch people breaking the rules. California regulators police water use with an open-source program from OpenET. Incorporating satellite data, the program estimates water that plants “breathe” into the atmosphere and water that evaporates from farm fields. This information, coupled with a database of planted crops, indicates whether farmers are exceeding their allotment of irrigation water. On land, watchdog groups point satellites at natural gas fields to reveal production wells that leak methane. At sea, they track illegal fishing.
SWOT, which will measure ocean currents in addition to freshwater flows, will be the latest entrant into this hall of remote sensing champions.
Pavelsky, a professor in the department of earth, marine, and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is giddy about the mission and the knowledge it will generate. The drying of the American West, for instance, has revealed the precariousness of reservoirs.
“If you’re a water manager in a region, and you need to know how much water you have available, or how that’s changed over time, we’re going to be able to tell you that in ways that that we’ve never been able to do,” Pavelsky said.
For oceans, SWOT will track small-scale currents and eddies that transport nutrients, salt, and heat. This information will be useful for understanding the ocean’s role in a changing climate.
For rivers, instruments on the satellite will map how floods move across the entire watershed, which is helpful for modeling future inundations. It will also, for the first time, provide a relatively accurate estimate of the water flowing in the world’s major rivers.
“We think that’s absolutely critical,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of science at NASA. “The currency of the future is water, and it’s those types of spacecraft that are needed to understand and help utilize it the right way.”
The equipment is so sensitive that it will detect water level changes in the roughly 2 million lakes larger than 250 meters by 250 meters. That’s a surface area equal to a cluster of about 11 football fields. The hope is that the instruments can survey smaller lakes that are 100 meters by 100 meters. The number of lakes measured would then increase to 6 million. Rivers wider than a football field is long will be surveyed, too.
SWOT will pass over sites every week to 10 days. Due to the orbital path, locations closer to the poles will be monitored more frequently than those near the equator. This interval means that SWOT excels for large-scale watershed changes, like the historic floods earlier this year that submerged one-third of Pakistan. SWOT won’t detect changes in creeks or a flash flood that arises after an hour-long downpour. And it won’t transmit data every 15 minutes like a U.S. Geological Survey river gauge. But for large swathes of the world that are essentially a blank space for hydrological information, the mission will be a revolution.
A data revolution energizes scientists like Pavelsky. But data is also power. And data about water is occasionally guarded as a matter of national security. How SWOT will influence the political balance of power is a question that Faisal Hossain is tasked with understanding.
A University of Washington professor and hydrologist, Hossain leads the applications team investigating how people will use SWOT data.
Political sensitivities are an important consideration. Countries in the headwaters of major rivers might not share information with downstream neighbors about reservoir operations. Hoarding water is not a good look. Egypt has raised concerns about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia and how the dam will affect its access to water from the Nile. In the Mekong basin, Thailand filed a complaint with a regional consultative body in 2020 about China’s dams in the river’s upper reaches.
SWOT will pull back the veil of secrecy. Two research projects affiliated with the mission focus on the Nile and Mekong basins. Hossain said verified, publicly available data act like “an independent jury” and could put countries on more even footing.
“It’s kind of like the internet – it democratizes access to water information,” he said.
Hossain recently returned from a trip to Jordan, where he met with Iraqi officials to discuss water issues. The Iraqi officials, he said, were interested in how much water is being held in reservoirs in southeastern Turkey, on rivers that flow into Iraq. Satellite data that reveals seasonal storage changes in the reservoirs would “help them prepare better,” Hossain said. “But also in driving negotiations for water sharing.”
SWOT team members are excited about the upcoming launch because they’ve spent a large portion of their careers nurturing the project. Hossain joined the team in 2008. Pavelsky started even earlier, attending his first SWOT development meeting in 2004, when he was in graduate school.
Once the satellite is in orbit the work doesn’t stop. Data — terabytes per day — will be transmitted starting in March. But it won’t be usable until late summer 2023 at the earliest. First it must be verified for accuracy. Doing so is not a desk job. Pavelsky said that teams will fan out across the globe — the Rhine River, Willamette River, Sierra Nevada lakes, rivers in Alaska, French Guiana, and Madagascar — to measure lake levels and river flows on the ground and compare those results to the SWOT output.
Pavelsky, who recognizes the political sensitivity of the data, will monitor the Waimakariri River, a braided waterway in New Zealand.
“We need to get SWOT data to a place where people really trust it,” Pavelsky said. “And so I think the validation work that we’re going to do is going to be absolutely key.”
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Read More »The Aspiring ‘Coral Factory’ Restoring Reefs
November 4th, 2022
Via The Washington Post, an article on Coral Vita, a for-profit company, which aims to grow corals up to 50 times faster than in nature, improve their resilience to climate change and provide large-scale restoration services through land-based farms:
Sam Teicher hovers over a section of Rainbow Reef, his yellow and black scuba fins stilling in the turquoise waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Contrary to the reef’s colorful name, the corals below him make up a bleak palette of grays. He looks up from the broken, stick-like pieces and uses one hand to make a slicing motion across his throat. Dead.
Leaving the coral graveyard behind, Teicher swims to another area of the reef nearby, carefully steering clear of healthy elkhorn corals that dot the seascape.
Tiny, yellow fish dart away as he moves closer to a cluster of finger-sized staghorn corals — a critically endangered species essential for reef-building — protruding from a plate attached to the reef. Teicher gestures toward the lemon-hued branches, then points at himself. Ours.
The small collection of corals is one of many that were farmed on land and then planted onto reefs near Grand Bahama island this year by Coral Vita, a company founded by Teicher and fellow Yale University graduate Gator Halpern that is trying to help drive restoration of coral reefs — vital ecosystems that are being decimated around the world by climate change.
Efforts to revive coral reefs have existed for decades. Traditionally, restoration has involved growing corals in the ocean, with natural growth rates per year ranging from less than a centimeter to up to 10 centimeters, depending on the species. But as the threat against reefs has intensified, researchers are introducing innovative methods to farm, grow and plant healthy corals more efficiently.
These advances include growing them in tanks on land, or using advanced techniques to boost growth rates and resiliency to the changing environment. Coral Vita’s founders say they are integrating a range of these approaches — such as cutting corals into small pieces, a process known as “microfragmentation” — to grow corals up to 50 times faster than in nature, improve their resilience to climate change and provide large-scale restoration services through land-based farms.
The idea behind a farm model that combines science and production technology is to “reframe the process of coral farming from kind of a coral-gardening style that it traditionally has been and move it more towards a coral-factory-style setup,” says Halpern, 32, the company’s president.
In another twist, Coral Vita is operating as a for-profit company — an approach to funding that has drawn some skepticism within a field dominated by nonprofit organizations and research institutions that are typically funded by grants and philanthropic donations. But Teicher and Halpern say their for-profit model, which can generate revenue from various sources including restoration contracts and ecotourism, is necessary to repair reefs on a massive scale.
Traditional coral farming has “a very important role to play,” Halpern says.
But Teicher, 32, the company’s “chief reef officer,” says a for-profit model may unlock sources of funding that could help make the field less dependent on grants and donations at a time when climate change and human activity, such as overfishing and pollution, are rapidly degrading coral reefs.
While reefs occupy less than 1 percent of the ocean floor, but are home to more than 25 percent of marine life. They also provide a host of essential resources to people, such as food, coastal protection, and income from tourism and fisheries.
Coral can be particularly vulnerable to rising ocean temperatures. If the water is too warm, corals will expel the algae that live in their tissues. These algae not only give corals their vibrant colors, but also serve as a source of nutrients. Without their plant partners, corals turn white, a process known as coral bleaching, and can die over time.
Mass die-offs of coral reefs, which are also affected by disease and ocean acidification, would have far-reaching ecological, economic and security consequences, scientists say. Their demise could deplete biodiversity, eliminate a major source of food and income for people, and leave coastal areas even more vulnerable to powerful waves and extreme weather.
Since launching its pilot farm in Freeport on the island of Grand Bahama in 2019, months before a powerful hurricane devastated the island, Coral Vita has attracted global attention. The company was recognized last year as one of five inaugural Earthshot Prize winners, an environmental award established by Britain’s Prince William that gives awardees a million pounds (about $1.07 million in today’s dollar) each to fund their work.
“There are 100 countries and territories, more or less, with coral reefs,” Teicher says. “There need to be large-scale coral farms in every single one of them.”
Coral Vita — which has raised more than $4 million in funding from a roster of investors including Sustainable Ocean Alliance, Apollo Projects and Builders Initiative — planted their corals for the first time earlier this year. The company has grown its team to more than a dozen people, with plans to expand further. But Teicher says that it matters less whether Coral Vita is involved in these other farms, as long as “the impact is happening.”
“Coral restoration is not a silver bullet. We need to stop killing coral reefs,” he says.
But with scientists warning that climate change could largely wipe out the world’s coral reefs by 2050 without a major cut in greenhouse gas emissions, Teicher says the Coral Vita team is focused on another target: for there to be a “thriving restoration economy where reefs and communities are prosperous and healthy and surviving because we’re investing and taking care of them.”
“Hopefully, we can have a transformative model,” he says. “You can do for-profit for good.”
Scalable ‘smart’ farms
“It really is one of the most state-of-the-art facilities for coral restoration,” says Teicher, who strolls around the farm in a company T-shirt, navy board shorts and worn, brown flip-flops.
Typically, pieces of coral are grown in underwater nurseries before being planted on reefs — a common process that is low cost, doesn’t require complex technology and keeps the corals in their natural environment. Coral pieces are typically hung like ornaments from treelike structures made of PVC pipes before being transplanted back onto reefs or used as stock to grow more corals. But these corals are often vulnerable to the elements, as well as disease and predation, says Jessica Ward, the U.S. Virgin Islands coral manager at the Nature Conservancy.
Land-based nurseries — such as the Coral Vita farm, where corals are nurtured in tanks before being planted onto reefs — are becoming more common.
While the operations tend to come with a hefty price tag and are more labor intensive, they provide an opportunity to raise corals in a controlled environment where experimental methods could be used and “allows for scalability of restoration,” Ward says.
“Restoring reefs at scale means we can restore large areas of reef in a shorter amount of time than more traditional methods, and more efficiently, with the goal of getting reefs to a point where they are self-sustaining faster,” she says. “This is crucial to saving coral reefs in the face of myriad threats that are not abating, particularly climate change.”
The bits of coral growing in the tanks at Coral Vita’s farm are the product of microfragmentation, where cutting larger chunks of coral into small pieces stimulates growth in the same way human skin heals from a wound. Marine biologist David E. Vaughan, who is credited with discovering the method, says it is “a game changer for corals.”
In just a couple of years, microfragments cut from the same coral that are planted onto reefs can eventually fuse together to become a head of coral, a process that would take anywhere from 25 to 100 years to happen naturally, says Vaughan, who consulted for Coral Vita during its earlier years but no longer has financial ties to the operation.
What’s more, he says, even though these corals are “only kindergartners,” their size triggers them to act like mature corals and become reproductive during spawning season.
Coral Vita is also beginning to experiment with “assisted evolution,” or techniques aimed at accelerating adaptive processes that happen in nature. For corals, these methods largely focus on improving resilience to climate change, such as increasing heat tolerance, says Madeleine van Oppen, one of the researchers who published a foundational scientific paper on assisted evolution in 2015.
There is “no genetic modification, but it’s just speeding up what happens naturally,” says van Oppen, a professor at the University of Melbourne and the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
One approach, for instance, involves breeding the most heat-tolerant corals found on the reef to produce heat-tolerant offspring for restoration. These corals can be identified by exposing corals to environmental conditions that reflect a warming planet and observing how the specimens react.
Some worry that assisted evolution techniques “would create a super coral that will outcompete anything that is still there,” van Oppen says. “I personally think that’s quite unlikely. The improvements that we see are relevant, but not such that I think that they will just wipe out anything.”
Additionally, the farm is outfitted with a high-tech aquaculture system, referred to by Coral Vita employees as the “life support system,” which supplies water to the tanks and can regulate water quality through temperature, pH and other adjustable settings.
The land-based system can be replicated elsewhere, Teicher says, with some adjustments for a region’s specific coral. “It can be very plug and play, which is really important for being scalable.” he says.
Selling restoration
The potential for scalability is critical to Coral Vita’s business plan, which is connected to the idea of “selling restoration as a service,” Teicher says.
While Teicher says that grants and awards have made up a “larger chunk” of the company’s revenue streams, Coral Vita signed its first restoration contracts with the Bahamian government and the Grand Bahama Port Authority in 2021. Though the payment amounts are “not that large,” he says that “for any island nation government to commit funds to something like coral reef restoration is amazing.”
The company has also been able to generate revenue through other sources. For instance, paying visitors can take an educational tour of the farm. Coral Vita also has an adopt-a-coral program, through which individuals and corporations can sponsor anything from small fragments to entire tanks. Last year, Teicher says, the coral adoption program brought in more than $60,000.
The work “speaks to their commitment to Grand Bahama, speaks to their commitment to the Bahamas, and it speaks to their commitment to sea life,” says Clay Sweeting, the minister of agriculture and marine resources in the Bahamas. “It’s a big task to undertake.”
The business, Teicher and Halpern say, has weathered its share of challenges.
“It’s been a long and rocky road to get here,” said Halpern, speaking over Zoom from Saudi Arabia.
“We’re not a for-profit because we get to make money and become rich,” he adds. “The amount of funding available in the philanthropic nonprofit space is a drop in the bucket in terms of the opportunity that exists to be able to make a difference if you’re able to harness the power of capitalism for the benefit of the environment.”
But the company’s for-profit model has prompted some skepticism.
“All the other groups that are working on these problems are doing it for the good of the planet and not to make a profit,” says Gail Woon, a marine biologist and founder of Earthcare, a nonprofit environmental education organization based in Grand Bahama. “I’ve always had a problem with that part of their project.”
It also remains to be seen if a for-profit approach such as Coral Vita’s can have its intended large-scale impact on the reef, says Vaughan, who now heads the nonprofit Plant A Million Corals Foundation, which he founded.
A farm operation that may have, at minimum, about a couple million dollars in start-up costs and plants fewer than 5,000 to 10,000 corals a year “isn’t the economic scale that we need to get this to,” Vaughan says, adding that hundreds of thousands of operations “costing couple of dollars a coral” will be required.
“This is a different philosophy and a different model, and if that is what gets corals planted to save our reefs, save our ocean and save our planet, great,” Vaughan adds. “We’re going to go and stick with the nonprofit model and try to get there faster with the ability to get to scale.”
Still, Woon says, she believes Coral Vita’s work holds promise. “It is scalable, and it is doable,” she says. “I want to see them be successful.”
Rocky beginnings
It all started in 2013 with a conversation between two friends in their first year of graduate school at what is now known as the Yale School of the Environment. They were hanging out on the back porch of a clapboard house on a tree-lined residential street in New Haven.
Despite being a scuba diver, Halpern, a San Diego native, had never heard about the possibility of restoring degraded reefs. Meanwhile, Teicher, who grew up in D.C. and also dives, had worked on a coral restoration project that used the traditional method of growing corals in underwater nurseries.
As Teicher recounted this experience to Halpern, the two realized they could try to take a different approach.
Armed with their idea and some funding from grants, the pair enlisted the help of coral experts such as Vaughan. Coral Vita landed its first investor in 2016 and others soon followed, including former Washington Nationals pitcher Max Scherzer, who now plays for the New York Mets, and his wife Erica.
Teicher and Halpern chose Grand Bahama as the site for the company’s first farm after evaluating factors such as water quality at restoration sites as well as potential for ecotourism and local and government partnerships. They moved to the seahorse-shaped island in 2018.
By May of the following year, the farm was open and operational, growing 24 native species of coral. (Most restoration projects in the Caribbean grow between two to five species, Teicher says.)
They experienced a coral spawning event, a natural phenomenon where corals in the ocean reproduce by releasing their eggs and sperm at the same time. School groups were touring the farm. Restoration inquiries were coming in.
Then, on Sept. 1, 2019, Hurricane Dorian slammed into Grand Bahama, generating a 17-foot storm surge that left much of the farm underwater. Despite their best efforts to secure everything, the company’s tanks were washed away and none of the corals survived — a year and a half’s worth of work lost.
“It just was destruction,” Teicher recalls.
Elsewhere on Grand Bahama, though, the devastation was much worse. Entire homes were gone. Dozens of people were dead, and even more were missing, numbers that are probably underestimates of the storm’s true toll. Emergency responders couldn’t reach parts of the island where roads were blocked by water and storm debris or that had been completely washed out.
Coral farming was no longer an immediate priority. “We’ll just go help people,” Teicher says, remembering the decision to pivot to assisting with relief efforts. “There’s nothing else to do but help people at this point. That’s what we could do.”
Alannah Vellacott, 32, Coral Vita’s coral restoration specialist.
Teicher says he and other Coral Vita employees were among the first people to reach some of the island’s eastern settlements, including High Rock, which was one of the communities hit hardest by Dorian.“Coral Vita turned into Rescue Vita,” says Alannah Vellacott, a marine ecologist and Grand Bahama native who was Coral Vita’s first Bahamian employee.
“I’m really, really grateful that they wanted to be those people for the Grand Bahamians that lived in the Eastern communities,” says Vellacott, 32, whose childhood home was destroyed during Dorian.
As the community of Grand Bahama began the process of recovering from Dorian, so did Coral Vita. The company recovered all but one of its coral tanks and began rebuilding in November 2019.
“I thought they would come in, see that it’s not worth it, or come in, run out of money,” Vellacott says. But “they stayed after Dorian,” she adds, eyes glossing over, voice thick. “It was then that I realized that they were actually going to stick around.”
A broad impact
Since reopening the farm in March 2020 and surviving the pandemic, “basically everything is finally where we want to be,” Teicher says on one sweltering August morning as he walks along a path by the coral tanks.
From February to July this year, Coral Vita completed its first out-planting session, planting roughly 5,600 corals grown at the farm across two areas of reef. While some permitting issues and inclement weather impacted their ability to hit their goal of planting 10,000 corals by the summer, Teicher says, the team hopes to have that many corals, and ideally more, planted by the end of the year.
But the company intends for its impact to go beyond the environment, its founders say.
Coral Vita works with other local environmental organizations, and more than half of its growing staff is Bahamian, according to Teicher.
“I don’t want to give my child an ocean that they cannot be fed by, be comforted by, that they can’t play in and have a great time,” says Vellacott, who grew up exploring mangroves in the backyard of her childhood home and the expansive ocean that surrounds the island. A gold conch pendant — “a reminder of who I am and where I came from” — and a signet ring that belonged to her father, a biology teacher, hang from a gold chain around her neck.
Vellacott looks out from the second story of the farm’s main building, motioning in the direction of the rows of tanks. “This is all going to be for my children, for my nieces and nephews, for future Bahamians, for this region,” she says.
“We’re not going to see restored reefs in our lifetime,” she adds. “None of this is for us. It’s for the future.”
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Read More »Tiger Sharks Carry Cameras to Help Scientists Map Seagrass
November 4th, 2022
Via The Smithsonian, an interesting report on how sharks are being used to help expedite ocean research:
If a human diver tried to map underwater seagrass, it would be slow going. Limited to fairly shallow waters, the person would need to come up for air and take breaks from swimming. So, to better understand where these marine flowering plants grow, a team of scientists turned to some unusual allies: sharks.
In a new study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers mapped out what might be the world’s largest seagrass ecosystem using cameras and trackers attached to tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier).
They estimate the patch, located in the Bahamas, could be as large as 35,521 square miles—double the size of a seagrass ecosystem off the coast of Australia that was previously thought to be the world’s largest. The new find expands the known seagrass coverage globally by about 41 percent, per the study.
The massive meadow of seagrass, which is known to store carbon, is good news for the climate.
“This discovery should give us hope for the future of our oceans. It demonstrates how everything is connected,” lead author Austin Gallagher, the chief executive officer of the nonprofit Beneath the Waves, tells Nick Kilvert of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). “The sharks led us to the seagrass ecosystem in the Bahamas, which we now know is likely the most significant blue carbon sink on the planet.”
Blue carbon is carbon captured and stored in marine and oceanic ecosystems. Per the World Wildlife Fund, seagrass captures carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests do. This means that on top of providing important habitat and food for marine creatures, including imperiled manatees and endangered green sea turtles, seagrass meadows could also help combat climate change.
“Our results indicate that seagrass in the Bahamas may contain 19.2 to 26.3 percent of all the carbon sequestered in seagrass meadows on Earth,” Wells Howe, a program manager on Beneath the Waves’ Blue Carbon project, tells Popular Science’s Laura Baisas.
To make their discovery, researchers attached cameras to the sharks with biodegradable cables and swivel connectors that were designed to corrode in seawater after 24 hours. Between 2016 and 2020, they affixed six sharks with front-facing cameras. A seventh shark toted the “first-ever deployment of a 360-degree camera borne by a marine animal,” write the authors. They also attached satellite tags to eight other sharks to record data on water temperature and swimming depth.
The animals were capable of “covering areas that were not logistically possible for human access,” traveling both deeper and farther than humans can, the authors write.
This isn’t the first time that researchers have used animals to find seagrass meadows, Professor Michael Rasheed, head of the Seagrass Ecology Lab at James Cook University, tells the ABC.
“There are some really neat stories of [satellite] tagged green turtles turning up in places where people think, ‘Why would they be out there?’” Rasheed tells the publication. “And when people have gone and had a look, they’ve found these magnificent seagrass meadows in the middle of the Indian Ocean.”
Rasheed, who did not participate in the research, questions whether this find is truly the largest seagrass meadow in the world. Some seagrass systems join together, so it’s not always easy to pinpoint where one meadow ends and another begins. Nevertheless, the new discovery is “certainly a large seagrass system,” he tells the ABC.
In the future, Beneath the Waves plans to embark on a multiyear journey to explore and document seagrass meadows with the environmental nonprofit SeaLegacy, writes Forbes’ Melissa Cristina Márquez.
“What this discovery shows us is that ocean exploration and research are essential for a healthy future,” Gallagher tells the publication. “The untapped potential of the ocean is limitless.”
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