Project Coral-ation: Can AI help save the coral reefs?
In the past 30 years, 50% of the world’s corals have died and 90% of reefs may not survive past 2050 in one of the most visible effects of the climate crisis.
The Dock — Accenture’s global R&D center — has been working with The Australian Institute of Marine Science and The Ocean Agency to use AI, computer vision and machine learning to transform how they monitor coral reefs. This will help scientists as they work to strengthen coral reef resilience in the Pacific.
The project began life during an AI for the Environment Hackathon, in which Accenture employees from a variety of disciplines such as software engineering, design, AI and analytics were challenged to come up with technological solutions to help save the coral reefs. A team at The Dock suggested using computer vision techniques to help scientists identify resilient coral species among the millions of pictures they had already taken in reef surveys.
The team won the global Hackathon competition and subsequently got in touch with Richard Vevers. He is the founder of the Ocean Agency and he may be familiar to many people from the Emmy-award winning documentary Chasing Coral.
“The solution we came up with uses computer vision techniques to unlock as much information as possible from the images of the coral, be that the coral species that are in the image, whether it’s dead or alive, and whether we can see any signs of stress,” says Aoife Whelan, analytics lead on the Coral-ation project. This helps researchers to more quickly identify resilient species, so they can focus their efforts on understanding why they are stronger and how their development can be accelerated.
“Conservationists tends to work in a bubble,” says Richard Vevers. “They don’t have the funding or the resources and that becomes the norm. [Most conservationists] jump underwater with a pencil and a clipboard and make notes. That doesn’t give the data at the scale we need to make decisions … we need a complete shift where we use the best technology to look at what are massive issues and tackle them quickly.”
Vevers recently came to The Dock to meet the team and explore where the project might go in the future. “Seeing the approach here with The Dock and the people here, and seeing it on a completely different level, you realize the potential of this technology,” he said during his visit. “Suddenly, we can really transform what’s possible in terms of the investment into these critical ecosystems.”
View open roles in The Dock here.
