Dive Right In
Let's see it on The Registry...
Why Share Your Observation?
What is the Registry?
The World Federation for Coral Reef Conservation (WFCRC) gladly presents the Collaborative Beach and Coral Reef Registry. The Registry, consisting of an ArcGIS Survey 123 and Dashboard, is a user-friendly and open-source platform that allows users the ability to view, document, and download publicly submitted coastal and reef-related data. The Registry is built on a citizen-science framework that enables submitted data to be meaningful and captured by the public for the public. Not to mention, the Registry can be operated at the palm of a hand! While it is still in its beta phase, users from all around the world are invited to start using it.
Why is the Registry important? Who is it meant for?
At WFCRC, we believe the success of the Registry will support vast public usage and can be broadly shared in a manner that is focused on project areas from local to international. In other words, knowledge exchanges that are freely available for Registry users can reasonably address a broad range of priorities of local relevance spanning from science to health and commerce in their own backyard. Repositories with massive amounts of local knowledge could fuel the next wave of ocean exploration, marine management, coral conservation and restoration, and so much more.
While we invite submissions from all individuals, we hope to appeal to these five main types:
● Divers
● Boaters
● Angler
● Researchers
● Beach Patrons
Benefits of records submitted from various individuals include the following, but are not limited to:
● Marine managers will have access to consolidated and up-to-date records for the benefit of initiating and achieving conservation goals
● Eco-tourism will drive a renewed interest in local conservation
● Repository for past and present data
● Identification of local hazards
● Identification of local restricted access areas (i.e., turtle nesting sites, jellyfish)
● Identification of wildlife sightings
● Coral and coastal data from the public’s point of view
● Past and present weather, wind, wave, and tide conditions
● Data to support marine education for all educators
…..all from one resource!
How does the Registry Work?
Ready to get started?! The Registry is simple and easy to use. If you’re looking to submit and view data, click the survey link and fill out the survey as prompted. Once submitted, the dashboard’s link is provided at the submission page of the survey that will take you to the dashboard. If you only want to view data, please click the dashboard’s link.
Check out the Visual Guide section for a visual walk-through of the dashboard and its functionalities.
Ready to get started?!
The Registry is simple and easy to use. If you’re looking to submit and view data, click the survey link and fill out the survey as prompted. Once submitted, the dashboard’s link is provided at the submission page of the survey that will take you to the dashboard. There, you can scroll around and explore all submitted data including your own! If you only want to view data, please click the dashboard’s link
There is an immediate and strategic need to better administer to our oceans’ health, coral reefs, and coastal environments. As believers in evidence-based science, we share the framework necessary to provide better data-driven decisions.
Our Collaborative Beach Coral Reef Registry is a single source, living document for coral and coastal data. With user-friendly, interactive, scalable ESRI Geographic Information System (GIS) portals, maps and meta data, we can capture a holistic view of coral reef and coastal environments and assist in the transformation of data into actionable insights and help provide projections and solutions for the environmental crisis that coral and our oceans currently face.
For example, take the repository for the Florida Keys, The Keys Collector Dashboard. Right now, this combination of marine data and conservation implementation is unmatched by any other organization in the Keys.
Through the Collaborative Beach and Coral Reef Registry, WFCRC can help merge local and international science and connect communities and citizenry with all available data.
Looking back reveals the path forward
During the middle to late Jurassic period, coral reefs began to appear in the rock record, the layers of rock strata that geologists, paleontologists, and other earth scientists use to help understand geologic epochs and the Earth’s evolution over the course of millions of years.
The rock record, with its layers of fossils and sediment, has led to the discovery and understanding of past events and helps scientists identify cycles and patterns, providing the evidence and framework and to make reasonably reliable predictions of what is to come.
While we know coral reefs have been on the planet a long time, data collection and retention is limited.
Many individuals, companies, and academic institutions have made great strides in capturing compartmentalized marine and geological data. Two of the more expansive reef records currently available are the NOAA Coral Reef Information System and ReefBase.
However, much of the world’s information remains scattered across the globe, stored in different formats. It's not always accessible, well-known, or even shared. Without a structured and shared data-managing system, it’s often difficult to find information, or even to know what information exists.
The Details
How does the Collaborative Beach and Coral Registry work?
The Collaborative Beach and Coral Reef Registry invites local participants to observe, monitor, and study environmental facts and impacts on coral reefs—terrestrial, marine and human—over periods of time.
WFCRC consolidates the various types of collected data into a site-specific, searchable platform for a deep dive into the digital Earth, described by some as a “geological Google” or a “digital twin.”
By mashing up mutable information layers, previously unknown events, trends, patterns and trouble spots become visible, allowing better decisions to be made based on real-time data.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c508f9a7fe8843c485f57ce640610559
Real-time data
With location-based digital stream tracing, alerts from gaging stations and other pollution and sediment sources, GIS mobile maps can give local communities a heads up on impending events, like sediment flows, for example.
In the short term, beach goers would find this information helpful as they plan fishing trips or decide where to swim. In the long term, we may be able to implement better strategies and practices that preserve the health of the ecosystems we love and rely on.
Mobile mapping is community mapping
Participants can access the interactive map from their mobile devices where they’ll be able to upload information and access all information collected by others.
Our goal is to keep the platform simple enough to encourage involvement and dynamic enough to be an engaging reminder of the many participants collaborating in effort to be a part of something larger.
Setting data free
"At the moment the earth science 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." ~ Michael Stephenson, AAPG member and executive chief scientist at the British Geological Survey