Coral reef systems are important for a number of reasons. Since they are sensitive ecosystems, they can be used as barometers for the conditions of the oceans and as indicators of climate change. Coral reefs provide protection for shorelines. They are habitats for nearly one quarter of ocean fish species and provide a source of food for millions of people. As well as natural and climate change related pressures on the reef systems, man is having an increasingly devastating effect. In the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, entire reefs are being destroyed by poachers harvesting giant clams. The BBC recently reported on this activity. You can find one of the BBC stories here.
You would think that with this importance there would be abundant data on reef systems and that they would have been the subject of numerous studies. Oddly, there has not been a lot of scientific study of reef ecosystems over the global reef areas. While there have been lots of smaller studies using conventional marine technologies and underwater data gathering, the results of these studies really can’t be scaled to determine what is happening to reef systems at a larger scale.
NASA is undertaking a three-year project to survey the reefs in greater detail on a global basis. This survey, called the COral Reef Airborne Laboratory (CORAL), will use an airborne Portable Remote Imaging Spectrometer or PRISM, developed and managed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Additional, concurrent in-water measurements will be used to validate the airborne measurements of reef condition.
One of the expected outcomes of this expedition will be the creation of a unique database of uniform scale and quality for the large reef areas.
Shown below is an illustration produced with Autodesk AutoCAD Map 3D. It is based on data taken during a study of part of the reef system around the island of Maui. The data was derived from the original SHP files and I migrated it to a SQL Server database. An FDO connection to that database populated the map. The illustration shows a portion of the reef themed to highlight the health and density of the coral. The 3D view shows this theming as a graph where the height of each polygon represents the overall health in that area. You can see the red area where some major silting was detected and the colony has suffered. The confession here, however, is that while the reef areas are correct, I have fabricated the health and density data so I could show one of the ways this type of data may be represented.
I’m really interested to see if the NASA data will be available upon completion of the survey. I’m sure it will make for some interesting and enlightening presentations.