What’s the future of the world’s coral reefs?
In February of 2020, scientists at University of Hawaii Manoa released a study addressing this very question. The models they developed forecasted a 70–90% worldwide loss of coral by 2040. Even more alarming, they projected that “few to zero suitable coral habitats will remain” by the year 2100.
So, the future of coral doesn’t look great.
Interested in seeing these numbers firsthand, today we will develop our own forecasts of hard corals in the Caribbean. After restructuring the data, we’ll fit an extremely famous time series model: ARIMA. ARIMA has been popularized…
Have you ever seen a Caribbean reef? Well if you haven’t, prepare yourself.
Today, we will be answering a question that, at face value, appears quite simple: “What does a Caribbean reef look like?” However, this question can be decomposed into many complex layers. So to avoid ambiguity, let’s refine the question to: “What are the non-mobile components of a Caribbean reefs and how are they related?”
That seems reasonable; we’ll have to look at fish another day.
Now we’re not going to roll out beautiful images of underwater cities teeming with diversity. Instead, we have bar charts. …
Ok, here’s a million dollar question: is the Caribbean really dying? Or, more specifically, are marine species found on Caribbean reefs becoming less abundant?
To answer this question we’ll need to pick our weapons of analysis, namely…
- An annual time series plot.
- Linear regression with weights.
Surprisingly, these tried and true methods give us plenty of insight into the data (we’ll find an excuse to break out neural nets another day). In the meantime, we have four plots below, each of which shows a different marine organism’s average annual count over the past 22 years. So, let’s jump right in.
Analysis of Hard and Soft Corals
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Michael Berk
Recent graduate from the University of Pennsylvania where I studied data science and environmental science.
