Model and Strategy
Coral reefs support millions but are under assault from development, overfishing, and climate change. The key to saving coral reefs is provisioning communities and decision-makers with spatially-explicit conservation options that relieve pressure on reefs. This is not yet possible due to limitations of field approaches that miss the myriad changes ongoing within reefs or satellite approaches that do not resolve the details of reef inhabitants. This “scale-gap” slows progress to apply management measures to protect reef biodiversity.
Our project will break this technology scale-gap. The Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) is a flying lab with highly advanced mapping technology. Building off past successes using the CAO for tropical forest and terrestrial animal conservation, we recently developed a new coral mapping approach. In trials, we mapped individual corals from the air. We propose to map shallow (~15m depth) corals throughout Hawaii to immediately advance a current multi-agency effort to manage coral reefs and propel community engagement on reef conservation. We will demonstrate our approach for coral reef conservation, providing a springboard to scale to the global level.
Impact
Our project will, for the first time, make it possible for conservation, management, and resource policy decision-makers to generate spatially explicit actions to conserve coral reefs in the Hawaiian Islands. By advancing the ability of stakeholders to work on a spatially detailed basis, the reef resource and zonation process will take into account actual coral reef condition, which has not been possible in the past, other than via small-scale diving surveys that are inherently biased. Our goal is to generate maps that will not only drive actionable decision-making but also greatly increase community engagement on the highly variable condition of Hawaii's coral reefs. Today, this knowledge is virtually nonexistent, so the use and abuse of reefs continues with little to no understanding of human impacts and ecological consequences.
We view this Hawaii project as a pathfinder for going global, both in terms of our science and technology capability, and our ability to use mapping to advance conservation and management of reefs anywhere in the world. By investing in Hawaii's reef conservation process now, we will be demonstrating the capability that can be transported and/or transferred to other regions and/or organizations, respectively.
Leadership
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Dr. Gregory Asner
Principal Investigator
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Timothy Doyle
Chief Operating Officer, Carnegie Institution for Science