The Collaborative Coral Reef Registry

Earth Scientists use the fossil/rock  record to tell “the story of the past”and shows the evolution of the earth, over millions of years.

 The rock record provides detailed information about the makeup of geologic epochs. The similarity of the rock record to the Collaborative Coral Reef Registry is clearly identified within the ESRI HUB platform as seen in our Keys Collector. 

Currently dozens of organizations are rushing to develop, populate and execute geo portals for various applications. Our focus is on pushing data down into the hands of the local casual end user that is himself, focused on coral and coastal health and monitoring. 

The Collaborative Coral Reef Registry captures a more holistic view of coral reef and coastal environments all based on GIS platforms. The best results come from evaluating and monitoring ALL of the impacts on coral reefs, terrestrial, marine and human.

Many organizations have made great strides in capturing compartmentalized, Coral Reef data and deposited it in secure servers around the world. In most cases this data is not readily shared and in some cases even charged for.

Knowledge workers and end users would have to specially know where to look for these data scattered across the internet. A single source for coral and coastal data will provide a substantially better overall real-time evaluation process, with user friendly, interactive, scalable GIS Portals, maps and meta data.

Paleontologists can compare the features of species from different periods in history to try to understand how species have evolved over millions of years. And the same can be said for The Collaborative Coral Reef Registry, which is its digital twin that we create for the ecosystem we want to protect.

The Collaborative Coral Reef Registry allows for local events and participation by local constituents, threats and parameters over time to be studied in relation to many other parameters in a single location without having to use mutable sources and/or databases.

For example, with the ability of individual citizen scientist or the family on the beach, observations at a known location (lat, lng), will be able to make assumptions about how other observations may affect coastal areas such as contaminated water, sediment runoff, or the movement of the red tide, research or what happen there last year or earlier.

With digital stream tracing for location, along with alerts from gaging stations and other point sources of pollution and sediment release, downstream alerts are displayed on gis mobile maps giving local constituency a heads up on impending events. Beach goers would find this information helpful as they plan where to swim and/or gather seafood. 

These are just a few of the relative impacts on local coastal areas, many more impacts will be revealed over time as this information is pushed down into the hands of the local end user.

Generations will be able to look back, in time at coral and coastal environments/data and make predictions based on past events. 

Setting Data Free

“At the moment the geoscience  community is really held back in many areas because we haven’t managed to set data free. It’s still in isolated databases, or even worse, in analogue form,” said Michael Stephenson, AAPG member and executive chief scientist at the British Geological Survey.

Data Types

WFCRC is consolidating specific data for specific locations, into a searchable platform for a deep-dive into the Digital Earth, described by some as a “geological Google.”  Or, digital twins. Our working group is a collaboration of earth/coral scientists, data managers, coastal conservationists, coral restoration/planting coral, and GIS Professionals, and is creating a data model to share and exchange coral, coastal conservation resource information for our end users.

One deeply rooted concern is the ability to allow existing data sources to “talk” to each other and combine with RSS feeds, IoT and other relative threads. 

In a world where everything seems to be connected – information, technology, and viruses – it only makes sense that earth science, geological and marine data should be connected in the same way.

The reality, however, is different. Marine and Geological data collected by individuals, companies and academic institutions across the world over hundreds of years is scattered across the globe and stored in different formats.

By mashing up mutable information layers, previously unknown events, trends/patterns and trouble spots become visible. Making this a decision based on real time data. The best kind!

The Digital Revolution
The world today is witnessing a digital revolution that will change history.  We are able to use data to demonstrate the four-billion-year evolution and history of the Earth visually and using other people-friendly approaches,” That will raise the level of human cognition of planetary processes to an unprecedented level. And hopefully raise the awareness of the decline of 70% of the earth’s surface, our oceans.

 The Keys Collector oceanographic observation Dashboard along with The Collaborative Coral Reef Registry, impact assessment on long term catalogued data and how the end user will now have access to a new world of gis data with relevance to specific locations’ like The Florida Keys. 

With the new access that end users will have to this data, the ecosystem management and recommendations is aimed at evaluating how oceanographic observations and data, will best serve the Keys or any location.

“When the end-users have access to the app, they would be able to easily take a photo of the ocean and/or related material, relevant current events, submit their data, see their point on the map, and click it to immediately see their image pop up. 

End Users will have an interactive map on their mobile device that’s simplified. I think that helps encourages collaboration of people to go out there and be more involved. You’re not just collecting data, sending it off, and then not seeing anything. You’re seeing data come in from local contributors  in the projec location , which reinforces the fact that you’re part of this bigger local  cause.”

Future research questions will focus on issues like:  “would you be more inclined to participate in a conservation effort if you could participate digitally”, and “It’s not only about building the technology. It’s about knowing what’s coming and what’s possible for the future of this application and initiative. 

This is about building an application built around a location for users to participate in an ongoing, long-term citizen science coral and coastal conservation plan.