Robots Help Seagrass Restoration
July 1st, 2023
Via BBC, a look at how robots are helping seagrass restoration:
Wales could become a world leader in large-scale seagrass restoration science following successful trials using robots.
Seagrass is known for its ability to store carbon and provide nurseries for fish.
Up to 92% of UK seagrass has been lost, but Wales could lead on restoration, conservationists have said.
The Welsh government said it would discuss how to further support seagrass restoration.
Project Seagrass, WWF and the Swansea University said the country could also produce methodology that could be applied across the world.
The Seagrass Ocean Rescue Upscaling Project (SORUP) in Wales aims to create a blueprint that can be applied to other countries.
In Dale Bay, Pembrokeshire, WWF and Project Seagrass led the UK’s first successful seagrass restoration methodological trials and meadow scale restoration project.
It was the UK’s first seagrass restoration project at a meaningful scale and experts are now developing and trialling technology and methods to make it easier and more cost effective to restore at scale.
SORUP has been using a robot to help plant the seeds at the restoration site in Dale, said manager, Sam Rees.
The robot, called Shack and designed by Reefgen in San Francisco, holds 20,000 seeds mixed with mud which it injects into the sediment in the seabed.
“The aim of our project is to take knowledge that we’ve learnt already and improve upon it and improve the methodology of seagrass restoration, improve its cost efficiency, its time efficiency and the resources that we use to do it,” Mr Rees said.
“We’ve already stored two hectares here using hand-based methods, but we’re now looking how we can improve on that, taking away some of the people it required and using the robot to do that,” he said.
According to Leanne Cullen-Unsworth, CEO of Project Seagrass, taking the lead in this field could bring international opportunities.
“We’re in such a good position to be sharing the message with the rest of the world about how important this habitat is, that we can lead on the science to put this habitat back.
“We’ve got the scientific expertise and the goodwill in place to be able to restore at scale.”
“The Welsh government had said quite a long time ago that they were going to make a commitment to seagrass and the marine environment more broadly and we just want that to be defined, we want to work with them to develop a programme that is going to help and protect seagrass.”
The Welsh government said it wanted to work with nature to help fight the climate and nature emergencies, adding that was why First Minister Mark Drakeford included seagrass restoration in his programme for government.
“The minister is looking forward to visiting Project Seagrass and WWF Cymru this summer to see their plantation work in action and discuss what action we can take to scale-up their vital work,” a spokesman said.
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Read More »June 24th, 2023
In part due to illegal fishing, more than one third of the world’s fishery stocks have fallen below biologically sustainable levels, threatening the more than 3 billion people who depend on seafood for animal protein and further imperiling maritime ecosystems already stressed by elevated levels of carbon dioxide.
It’s rampant.
Seafood is one of the last animal proteins that people hunt in large quantities. Although farmed seafood has grown to more than half of global consumption, more than one hundred million tons are caught in the wild every year. By one estimate, illegal and unreported fishing accounts for one-fifth of that total.
It’s on your store shelves.
As much as 11 percent of U.S. seafood imports came from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
A stark reality confronts anyone who seeks to rein in bad behavior on the ocean: it is very, very big. To pinpoint where in the haystack to search for needles, a team of data scientists and machine learning engineers called Global Fishing Watch collects data from fishing boats’ Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders, whose signals are picked up by satellites and land-based receivers.
Recently, the team at Global Fishing Watch had a novel idea: instead of looking for where fishing boats broadcast their positions, what if they looked for where they hid them? “The AIS data tells us a lot, but the absence of it does as well,” Tyler Clavelle, a data scientist at Global Fishing Watch, told me.
Together with scientists from the University of California at Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries, Global Fishing Watch analyzed more than 28 billion AIS signals from 2017 to 2019. The researchers identified more than 55,000 gaps in the data and discovered that disabled transponders hide about 6 percent of the globe’s commercial fishing activity.
Gaps in transponder data, 2017-2019
Fewer
More
EUROPE
U.S vessels
go dark in the
Bering Sea
to hide from
competitors.
ASIA
NORTH AMERICA
Chinese-flagged
boats often don’t
report catch in the
Northwest Pacific.
Africa’s west
coast is a hotspot
for piracy and
illegal fishing.
AFRICA
SOUTH AMERICA
Illegal fishing has
been reported near
the Galapagos and
off Peru.
AUSTRALIA
The boundary along
Argentina’s Exclusive
Economic Zone showed
the highest volume of
data gaps.
Fishing boats often hide their signals on the edge of Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) boundaries, where countries have the right to exploit the resources within 200 nautical miles off their shoreline. That’s just what the Oyang 77 did in early 2019 when it vanished and reappeared near the boundary of Argentina’s EEZ.
The South Korean-flagged trawler belonged to the fleet operated by the Sajo Oyang corporation, notorious for its record of high seas transgressions, as documented by The Guardian. In recent years, the Oyang 77 had gotten in trouble in New Zealand for illegally dumping dead fish overboard, underreporting catch and failing to pay workers, according to a report from Oceana, a nonprofit focused on ocean conservancy.
In February 2019, the Argentine Coast Guard discovered the trawler with its nets extended inside the EEZ. They found more than 310,000 pounds of seafood on board. Leaving nothing to chance, they deployed a helicopter and an airplane to assist the Coast Guard in escorting the Oyang 77 to shore, releasing it after confiscating its fishing equipment and extracting a fine of 25 million Argentine pesos, or about $550,000.
Sajo Oyang did not respond to multiple requests to comment.
Global Fishing Watch’s data did not help catch the Oyang 77, but patrol boats from the U.S. Coast Guard and Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans already make use of it to decide which boats to pursue. Countries inspecting fishing boats in port can use Global Fishing Watch’s analytical tools to narrow their search.
“You can look up a vessel and see a history of its activity and quickly filter out vessels that appear to be operating above board, or identify vessels that have big gaps in their data or are operating in ways that are suspicious,” Clavelle said.
Using ships’ AIS data to enforce illegal fishing laws is not as easy as it sounds. AIS is not universally mandated aboard commercial fishing boats. Many fleets, including U.S. fishing boats, are tracked with a separate technology called the Vessel Monitoring System, which is visible to authorities but hidden from other vessels.
AIS was created in the 1990s as a way to keep oil tankers from crashing. In the 2000s, private companies began launching satellites that could capture AIS signals from space, and a new industry emerged to supply government agencies with ships’ location data. Yet even law-abiding fisherman sometimes wish to hide their location, either to conceal good fishing spots from competitors or to avoid capture in waters where pirates lurk.
“We thought we might have a pure illegal fishing story,” said Heather Welch, a NOAA affiliate and marine biologist at UC Santa Cruz, who led the research with Global Fishing Watch. “And it became very clear that that’s not fair to the fishermen, that that’s not the story we’re seeing here.”
The researchers used a method of machine learning to separate the innocent AIS disabling from the nefarious. For instance, behavior that could have looked like statistical noise appeared to the researchers’ computer program as “loitering,” when boats with disabled transponders were motionless long enough to offload their catch to giant floating refrigerators called reefers.
This is not always illegal, but it can be a way for boats with illegal catch to get rid of the evidence. “It’s a way to launder illegally caught seafood into the supply chain,” Welch told me. That makes it harder to know whether the fish at the grocery store was caught legally or not. The analysis could help coast guards pinpoint where and when illegal transshipment is likely to take place.
Some in the fishing industry say that the rise of farmed seafood will reduce the opportunities for illegal fishing. The share of seafood from aquaculture grew from 6 percent in 1960 to 58 percent today, according to figures from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
That share is likely to keep rising, said Gavin Gibbons, vice president of communications at the National Fisheries Institute, an industry lobby. “There’s only going to be more farmed going forward. Period. End of story,” Gibbons told me. “Farming will have to increase in order to feed a growing planet.”
Yet aquaculture has only kept pace with the growth in seafood consumption and has not replaced wild caught seafood. Since the 1990s, wild seafood catch has stayed steady at about 100 million tons per year.
In short, fish farming has not lowered the pressure on wild marine life. Even if aquaculture continues to grow, there will always be demand for wild caught fish, which many people prefer to the farmed variety.
If aquaculture is not the solution to overfishing on the high seas, perhaps technology is. Global Fishing Watch and allies like Oceana, which co-founded the project in 2015, have pushed to require AIS on more commercial fishing boats. Global Fishing Watch’s next goal is to learn to detect fishing boats directly from satellite imagery, which would reveal far more activity than AIS signals alone.
“What gets monitored gets managed,” Clavelle told me. “So if you can’t see what’s happening on the ocean, how do you expect to manage it properly?” ,
Read More »Reconnecting To Nature Via Apps
May 9th, 2023
Courtesy of The Washington Post, a look at how naturalist apps, designed and managed by scientists with world-class data, help us reconnect with the world around us:
First I see the wall barley, like tiny fields of wheat on the side of the road. Then a profusion of musk stork’s-bill overflowing with purple flowers. That’s just the crack in the sidewalk.
By the time I reach my office, I’ve identified dozens of species, most unknown to me a few hours earlier.
I’m not a master naturalist, but I have one in my pocket. Thanks to artificial intelligence trained on millions of observations, anyone with a smartphone can snap a picture or record a sound to identify tens of thousands of species, from field bluebells to native bumblebees.
If I’m honest, it’s the kind of thing I would normally miss while walking or pedaling to work. Birdsong might be gorgeous but I’d barely hear it. I’d note “pine tree” as a catchall for conifers.
That has changed. I’m now on a first-name basis with most of my wild neighbors. It has reconnected me to a natural world I love, yet never studied deeply enough to know all its characters and settings. I’m hardly an exception.
Homo sapiens sapiens may have never been this divorced from nature. Humans across much of the industrialized world have become an indoor species: About 90 percent of our time is spent inside.
It’s hard to fathom. For 2.5 million years, humans spent a huge share, if not virtually all, of their time outdoors. Today, many adults are spending more hours on screens than outside.
Nature is even disappearing from our books, songs and culture, say researchers who looked at nature-related words in popular works during the mid-20th century. Our mental and physical health has declined alongside our estrangement from the outdoors.
But what technology has torn asunder, perhaps it can begin to mend. For people who don’t know the difference between a robin and a magpie, this new generation of naturalist apps is the Rosetta Stone to the natural world. Reestablishing relationships with your outdoor neighbors might not only transform your commute, it might change your life.
Four apps to rule them all
There are more than a dozen apps promising to help you identify the natural world, many of them paid. Don’t bother. Four apps, designed and managed by scientists with world-class data, meet all your ID needs free of charge. And every observation will advance our scientific understanding of the natural world.
The easiest to use is Seek. The app, an offshoot of iNaturalist, a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, lets you shoot live video. It automatically grabs frames and analyzes them. The augmented reality experience is like downloading a foreign language into your brain. The app identifies the taxonomy of plants and animals instantly as you shoot. If it can’t figure out the species, it will give you its best guess.
In less than an hour, I had racked up dozens of plants and insects near my house from Bombus vosnesenskii, a native yellow-faced bumblebee, to the purple-flowered bush lupine it was buzzing around. The only drawback? The app doesn’t include deeper context about the species it identifies.
For that, there’s iNaturalist and Pl@ntNet. Both offer sophisticated, if slightly less user-friendly, apps that upload and analyze photographs of flora. In seconds, they typically return a ranked list of potential candidates with rich descriptions of each. The identification of the most common species is a slam dunk. For rarer ones, it’s easy to compare your observation against those of others in the database.
The apps’ real superpower is the community around them: Millions of citizen scientists who can vet and confirm your observations. It’s particularly satisfying to watch your skills — and ranking — rise in the apps as you get to know your neighborhood. When you’re ready to up your game, download these apps.
Finally, there’s Merlin Bird ID, a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Merlin feels like magic. The app uses a phone’s sensitive microphone to identify bird vocalizations in the sonic landscape around you, painting a visual representation or sonogram analogous to a musical score.
Within seconds as I’m walking through San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the app recognizes the high-pitched staccato of a dark-eyed junco, as well as the falsetto of the Pacific wren.
Merlin has permanently changed how I hear the world. I can now tune in to birdsong operas that had never entered my consciousness. Within a day, I was able to recognize distinct calls without consulting the app.
That, of course, was the point, says Grant Van Horn, a machine learning researcher at the Cornell Lab, who helped build Merlin’s sound ID feature. “If you ever go on a bird walk with someone who knows their birds, it is crazy cool,” he says. “Our inspiration is getting that expertise and sharing it with anyone who has a phone in their pocket.” They succeeded.
Advancing science
But the apps are more than tools to get acquainted with nature. They’re pushing AI identification — and conservation — forward. Recognizing natural inhabitants, and our relationship to them, helps us rediscover what remains and protect it.“We’re just at the beginning of actual real scientific progress,” says Van Horn. “And none of this stuff happens without a passionate group of people that helps you curate, train and evaluate the data. There’s still a ton of opportunity for these passionate communities to contribute their expertise.”
The first big breakthrough came around 2018 from Snapshot Serengeti, a research project using digital camera traps to photograph thousands of migrating African animals. Organizing this enormous collection featuring a variety of animals, from wildebeests to giraffes, proved overwhelming for the small team of scientists.
So researchers enlisted thousands of online volunteers to sort and label more than 3 million images. That allowed Jeff Clune, then a computer scientist at the University of Wyoming, and his collaborators to unleash algorithms on what was at the time the world’s largest collection of labeled wildlife images. The new algorithms could identify animals in 99 percent of images with the same accuracy as human volunteers, around 97 percent, according to a seminal paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When applied to all data, it could save an estimated 8.4 years of human labor.
Breakthroughs like this are why the apps in your hand can now identify daisies, dandelions and, if you are on the African plains, a lion, Panthera leo. And every observation you contribute makes these a little bit better.
Citizen science-powered algorithms are now going beyond individual organisms. They’re mapping their relationships to an entire ecosystem, from the flower a butterfly pollinates to the leaf where the insect lays its eggs.
“My goal is to turn ecosystems into fire hoses of data,” says Clune. “In the same way a video game company knows everything that happens inside their system, we should know that for the Amazon rainforest. Imagine what that would mean for science. We could answer questions we would never have been able to do.”
Naming nature
Ultimately, the apps’ greatest breakthrough may not be technological at all. It may be raising our awareness. We are nearly blind to entire categories of living creatures. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer described it as “being lost in a foreign city where you can’t read the street signs,” a form of species loneliness. While these plants and animals are our neighbors, we scarcely acknowledge their existence, let alone their right to exist.
By naming my wild neighbors, I’ve found my perception of them transformed from grainy and distant to powerful and familiar.
Author Jenny Odell writes about a similar experience in the book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. The simple act of paying attention to the birds around her home in Oakland, Calif., led her down a path of reclaiming her attention from the frenetic, exploitative digital cacophony.
Now, instead of asking what’s there, she asks who: a raven, robin, song sparrow or nuthatch. Instead of a blur of green, she sees redwoods, oaks and blackberries.
This could reverse one of the great losses of the past century: our severed connection to the unique, wild character of where we live.
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Read More »Park Rangers Are Using Silent Ebikes to Catch Poachers
December 7th, 2022
Via Wired, a look at how a Swedish electric bike is helping Mozambique’s park rangers protect game and reducing the need for fossil fuel infrastructure in Africa’s remotest areas:
AT THE END of 2021, a group of night poachers in a Mozambique national park—using torchlight to blind antelopes—were suddenly the ones left stunned in the dark. The poachers, local opportunists looking for bushmeat in the area’s savannahs, forests, and wetlands, are often able to kill hundreds of animals in one hunt with near impunity, using dogs to track and finish off their prey. They move with confidence because they can hear the noisy petrol motorbikes of the overstretched rangers from more than a mile away, enabling them not only to escape, but also to know where the park’s guardians are and hunt around them—easy enough to do in the thousands of square miles of terrain.
Not this time. A team of rangers silently moved in on their off-road ebikes, halting the hunt immediately. The nearly silent motor of the ebike—a factor that can make them an accident risk in the busy city—has become the surprise secret weapon for saving the world’s most endangered species.
“The petrol bikes we’ve used previously have all been loud, heavy, and expensive to keep running in these areas. These bikes are quiet, which makes it easier for us to approach poachers undetected,” says Mfana Xaba, anti-poaching team leader of Southern African Wildlife College (SAWC), a nonprofit organization based near South Africa’s Kruger National Park. It supplies trained rangers to 127 parks across Africa, including the one in Mozambique. (The exact locations where they are using the bikes is being kept secret, for fear of compromising the mission.)
Several poaching attempts have been stopped this year already, saving a variety of animals, including tiny antelopes—suni, red duikers, and blue duikers—which poachers kill in huge numbers for bushmeat. While these species are not classed as “at risk” themselves, they form an essential part of fragile ecosystems on which endangered animals rely, says Alan Gardiner, an ecology professor and head of the Applied Learning Unit at SAWC. “Suni and the other small antelope form prey items for many predators such as leopards, crowned eagles, and pythons, as well as influencing vegetation growth. When any species is impacted in a system it has a knock-on effect.”
Fifty Kalk Anti-Poaching bikes, made by the Swedish company CAKE, will now be used across SAWC’s African parks, after being tested across the continent’s varied terrain, including plains, forests, and jungle. “The previous petrol bikes were immensely problematic, and not just because of the noise,” says Stefan Ytterborn, CAKE’s founder and CEO. “The petrol to power them has to be brought in using trucks or even helicopters, which is extremely inefficient. As you have to store gas in the jungle, the petrol can then be stolen either by poachers themselves or local people who need it.”
CAKE already produced an existing recreational off-road ebike, and it teamed up with SAWC when the college realized the quiet, durable bike could be revolutionary in Africa’s varied topography. After some tweaks, the Kalk AP was sent to Africa. It weighs 80 kilograms (176 pounds) and can reach speeds of 56 miles per hour, with around five hours of ride time. CAKE switched its standard tires for 18-inch off-road tires like the ones used in motocross, and supplied a software system providing navigation, communication, and location identification, enabling CAKE to retrieve vehicle data and continue to monitor and improve each bike’s performance.
Solar-powered mobile charging points mean rangers can camp in the bush for weeks. The charger, called the Goal Zero Solar Hub, can charge at least two bike batteries from empty to full in just three hours, and it takes 18 hours to charge itself from zero using the sun’s rays. “The charging points are a bit heavy—45 kilograms—but they can be pulled around on their built-in wheels like a suitcase,” says Ytterborn. “That means that at every station, there is a fresh battery on charge and ready to be swapped to the one on the motorcycle.”
This longevity means the rangers can disappear in teams of up to three to track poachers for several weeks, and spend longer embedded in rural communities, educating and supporting locals who often turn to poaching because they are desperate for food or money. Rangers currently distribute food vouchers and cash to dissuade locals from eating certain animals.
The Kalk AP bikes—which cost around £9,900 ($11,800)—will eventually be used across the continent, helping to protect Africa’s most endangered animals, such as the white and black rhinos that are attacked by professional, organized gangs seeking profits. Kruger National Park has lost almost 70 percent of its rhinos this decade, including 166 rhinos poached during the first six months of 2020.
Mfana Xaba, who has overseen the rangers in the field in Mozambique, believes the ebike will finally give them an edge on the persistent poachers. “Meat poachers are constantly trying to penetrate our area—hundreds of thousands of acres—and the poachers are very good at hiding. The element of surprise is very important. Forests and wetlands are the most difficult terrains for us to cross, but the silence of the bikes is by far and away their greatest attribute, as well as their very low running costs.”
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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 »Tiny Solar Backpacks Could Help Save One of Australia’s Most Endangered Birds
September 20th, 2022
Via EcoWatch, an article on how tiny solar backpacks could help save Australia’s endangered plains-wanderer:
The plains-wanderer is a small, critically-endangered bird with a tawny marking on its chest that can only be found in south-eastern Australia’s arid grasslands. It is estimated that only 250 to 1,000 of these speckled birds are left in the wild, according to Bush Heritage Australia. The plains-wanderer is at risk of impending extinction and is the lone surviving species on its branch of the evolutionary tree.
In order to track this rare bird species, fifteen plains-wanderers have been released into their native habitat in New South Wales (NSW) wearing tiny solar-powered backpacks equipped with satellite tracking technology, a press release from the NSW Government’s Minister for Environment and Heritage said.
It is only the second time the birds have been released in NSW and is part of a joint government conservation effort between Southern Australia (SA), Victoria and NSW.
“This second-ever release of Plains-wanderers back into their native habitat in NSW is the culmination of years of conservation work aimed at bringing the species back from the brink,” said NSW Environment Minister James Griffin in the press release. “Plains-wanderers are a small, ground-dwelling bird that is particularly vulnerable to threats such as foxes and feral cats, and native grassland habitat loss. They’re a critical part of the ecosystem because their presence or absence is an indicator of the health of their native habitat.”
As part of the Saving our Species program sponsored by the NSW Government — which has $175 in funding over a ten-year period — the plains-wanderers were released into Oolambeyan National Park, a critical habitat for the rare bird species.
The solar-powered backpacks can provide as much as two years of satellite data. Earlier backpack tracking devices only had a battery life of 12 weeks and were only able to be tracked with field transmitters.
“These solar-backpack wearing Plains-wanderers are paving the way for us to gather important data, which will ultimately help us improve our conservation efforts for wild populations into the future,” Griffin said.
Before a drastic decline in numbers in the past decade, the plains-wanderer was apparent throughout eastern Australia, reported The Guardian. Much of their known remaining habitat is on privately-owned land.
The quail-like birds have very specific habitat requirements. The population isn’t able to sustain itself during droughts, when there are fewer insects and materials to make nests. But during periods of extreme rain, an excess of weeds can cause the birds to relocate, but researchers aren’t sure where the endangered birds go.
All of the fifteen plains-wanderers released into the wild were from conservation breeding programs — eleven from NSW’s Taronga Western Plains Zoo, three from SA’s Monarto Safari Park and one from Victoria’s Werribee Open Range Zoo, the press release said.
“Three of the recently released birds have come from Monarto Safari Park, and this project is a great example of our zoos working together across a number of jurisdictions with the help of private landholders to help save a native species,” said South Australia Minister for Climate, Environment and Water Susan Close in the press release.
The second NSW release follows a release of ten birds in March near Hay in NSW and 16 last year in Victoria in conjunction with a national recovery initiative to bring the species back from the brink of extinction.
“This is the first ever plains-wanderer release to use satellite technology to track the endangered species and the more we know about this elusive bird, the better chance we have at conservation success. This joint initiative is part of our record investment into protecting our precious biodiversity,” said Victorian Minister for Environment and Climate Action Lily D’Ambrosio in the press release.
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