The Khaled Bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation for Living Oceans signed an agreement with NASA to grant the latter access to the foundation’s database, which is considered the largest of its kind, as it allows for the detection of a large number of coral reefs, in addition to providing data about the nature of those coral reefs, and the changes that are happening to them.
The project aims to map coral reefs around the world and track their health, and with the help of a revolutionary remote sensing device, NASA’s FluidCam, the foundation hopes to capture the carol reef’s exceptional scenery underwater.
Alexandra Dempsey, the Director of Science Management at the Khalid Bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, emphasized the critical importance of data acquisition and its role in enriching learning.
“If you’re using deep learning or machine learning, the quality of the data you use matters tremendously.” Dempsey said.
“The Foundation has the gold-standard dataset for training something like deep learning because we know it’s right—we took a ship and actually went there,” he added.
“These maps will be incredibly valuable for coral reef conservation,” noted Dempsey, who has spent her entire career working on coral reef science and conservation.
“It is really hard to develop effective conservation strategies such as marine protected areas if you don’t know what you’re conserving. These maps fill that gap and have the potential to benefit coral reef ecosystems, and the people who depend upon them, for generations to come.”
