It’s not news that the Great Barrier Reef needs our help. Just in the past five years, warming waters due to climate change have caused three major bleaching events. But there are those working on simple and accessible for people to take action from anywhere in the world. In this piece, Founding CEO of Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef and Co-Founder of Earth Hour Andy Ridley explains why the Great Reef Census project is so critical and how an engaged global community can make change happen.

The Great Barrier Reef is an extraordinary place. However, like coral reefs globally, it’s under increasing stress from climate change and has experienced three mass bleaching events in the past five years. But it’s massive – 2,300km long – so the impacts are not uniform and what we’re seeing is truly a patchwork, ranging from healthy reefs so beautiful they fill you with awe, to reefs badly degraded by bleaching, cyclones or crown-of-thorns starfish — and everything in-between. This is why we need a Great Reef Census.

The Great Barrier Reef is the same size as Germany, so the scale is enormous. Therefore, the challenges, not just in marine conservation, are also enormous. If we want to scale up our efforts, we need to think differently about conservation and utilise every asset available, whether that’s using tourism boats as research vessels, or recruiting citizen scientists to analyse survey images. We need to design the 21st century, shared-economy version of a conservation organisation – the Great Reef Census and Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef as an organisation are striving to do this.

In late 2020, we gathered a vast group of tourism and dive boats, superyachts and fishing vessels. Our collective research mission was to capture thousands of survey images from across the Great Barrier Reef. The team spent the best part of 11 weeks capturing that data. The next stage of this work is engaging a global community to help analyse them.

There are more than 4000 individual reefs on the Great Barrier Reef. While we know from long-term monitoring that the Reef is being significantly affected by climate change and other threats, there is a need for broad-scale reconnaissance data on the state of these reefs at an individual level to help understand what’s happening. The Great Reef Census will help fill some critical data gaps to give us a much clearer understanding of how the system is changing year-on-year and enable us to drive more targeted protection and regeneration activities.

To analyse the data collected our citizen scientists can just visit the website, select one of the 13,000 reef images captured and ‘colour-in’ where they see key elements like coral, sand and rubble. In parallel, a team of researchers at the University of Queensland have also been analysing the images so we can see just how good our citizen scientists are. At the end of the analysis, our research team at UQ will report back on what the data is telling us.

Healthy reefs release many larvae or ‘baby corals’ during the annual mass spawning event and play an important role in helping their neighbouring reefs recover from disturbance events like coral bleaching or cyclone damage. We need information on where these ‘key source reefs’ are located to help researchers and managers better target their resources, for example, which reefs should be considered for greater protection from problems like crown-of-thorns starfish. The Great Reef Census will help us to locate these important sources of reef recovery.