The Coral Gardeners project currently has four coral restoration sites and five coral nurseries in an attempt to restore coral reefs in Mo’orea, French Polynesia. While coral restoration is their main objective, the Coral Gardeners team recently launched ReefOS – a 360-degree underwater livestream that is broadcasting life on some of their nurseries around the clock. The project is “designed to become the most advanced artificial intelligence platform for coral reefs, providing an in-depth look at the health of reef ecosystems to help monitor and restore”, according to the Coral Gardeners website.
The main objectives behind the livestream are to connect people to the reef, to monitor reef restoration through tracking reef health, as well as to understand the reef ecosystem by gathering critical data on the restored areas.
The high-tech cameras and sensors that were placed in the coral reefs are connected to cloud servers where the embedded AI model gathers important information from the streamed data. This data is then organised and stored in the Coral Gardeners database. This information, the Coral Gardeners hope, will help to determine the health trends of the reef ecosystem over time. “We will be able to measure the impact of our restoration efforts by identifying and discovering changes in the ecosystem related to increased health. This will also allow us to detect early signs of disease, bleaching, or invasive species,” the website reads.
Watch the livestream here.
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Photography courtesy of Unsplash.
